


buildin' up all these kingdoms

by wanderNavi



Series: will fight dark lord for extra credit [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, What's that, sticking to the canon plot, thanks hell brain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2020-09-27 11:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20407315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Jules Zhao is not pleased with suddenly waking up in the Harry Potter universe and would like to avoid Voldemort's rise to power two: electric boogaloo, thank you very much.





	1. PART ONE: Allegro con brio (C minor)

**Author's Note:**

> These self inset fics were bound to happen eventually. All of these are purely for my own satisfaction and tellingly, the working title for this was "Surviving on a Diet of Sheer Force of Will and Determined Anger."
> 
> Title from Zayde Wolf's "King."

“That’s apparently Gringotts,” Jules says, sitting on shining marble steps, baking in the afternoon sunlight.

Their hand twitches for a phone that isn’t there in a pocket that isn’t there on pants that aren’t there because they threw on unfamiliar clothing dug out from a suitcase at the foot of an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room they woke up in that morning when the alarm actually howled, quite literally, at them to wake up. There’s a skirt instead, that Jules resents, and a collared button-up, that Jules acquiesces.

They’re shorter than yesterday, though not by much, though nor does this say much, since they’re still taller than plenty of the adults they pass by in the carless street. It’s better to focus on that component of the street, rather than the increasingly absurd storefronts, the accents buzzing around their ears, British, because this is _Diagon Alley_.

Under the midday sun, they sweat against the stiff cotton collar.

Last night – or that early morning, with the dawn light peeking into the window when they finally fell into the bed, changing clothing be damned – Jules hunched over stacks of printouts and reference books, hand straining over notes and head pounding with espresso shots. Somehow, in a disgustingly magical movement of universes, they shifted from writing essays and reports on the mysteries of the world to the looming mystery of how they landed in _Harry Potter_.

“Goblins, Jules. Wands, broomsticks, the whole shebang.”

Adults circumvent around their seated form, their shocked anger roiling with the sun’s glare.

Because they don’t know the how. They woke up alone in that inn room, and no adults came in to check in while they shuffled through the discarded clothing, the open trunk, the scattered papers. There’s no helpful context on the _how_. Oh, Jules read the _what_ – supply list for a Hogwarts first year with graphite check marks down the side and a stack of new books awkwardly sitting on the desk, an acceptance letter crumpled and rumpled with folds, a train ticket.

No parents, no siblings. An unfamiliar mailing address. For all intents and purposes, they seemed to have just – appeared. Jules can’t even find mention of who paid for the inn room or their supplies. Are they supposed to believe a child had the means to do it?

There’s someone pointing at Jules from the top of the stairs, cloak flapping vaguely in the air from the light wind and the movements, talking at a guard. The guard looks at Jules, contemplating if it’s worth the effort to dislodge an eleven-year-old from parking their butt on the front steps of the bank that employs him for too low a wage. Jules snatches up their messenger bag and hightails it off the steps.

* * *

Occasionally, Jules’ mind completely misfires, promptly dumping all ability to process the march of time or the conceptions of priorities and deadlines. They drift less often now, in their proto adulthood, but suddenly finding yourself in your childhood body should excuse them from missing the calendar and certain significant timeframes.

The bookstore’s clerk continues looking at Jules with a mild frown, taking in the uniform, and finally asks after handing over the notebooks, “Shouldn’t you be on the Hogwarts Express, dear?”

Their knuckles go white over the clenched grip on the leather covers. “Sorry, what was that?”

“It’s September 1st and well past eleven now.”

“Oh,” they say in a panicked breath. “Oh no.”

They sprint out of the bookstore, chased by the clerk’s attempt at helpfulness, “Eeylops Owl Emporium is down the street, there might still be time to send an owl to Hogwarts and alert them on the mistake.”

Yeah, and with what money.

Jules’ feet slap against the cobblestone on their path back to the Leaky Cauldron. It’s the first of September? They spent all morning wandering around clueless? _It’s the first of September and they missed the train?_

An owl is not going to be enough for this, and Jules hardly has any idea how to write that letter. To whom it may concern – most likely Professor McGonagall – I am a Muggleborn child, suddenly in the Wizarding world, which apparently doesn’t believe in hanging helpful calendars or clocks anywhere, and I’ve missed the Hogwarts Express. How should I proceed?

No, they have something better in mind and slam the inn door open and race up the stairs to their room. They dump the books onto the desk and fly around the room, yanking open drawers and cabinet doors, fishing out anything that looks like its their property, and packing the suitcase with experience borne of monthly trips around the country on the other side of the Atlantic. In goes the various textbooks and writing supplies. Jules yanks on the cloak hanging on the back of the desk chair and alright, these loose flapping sleeves are going to get annoying fast. Wand pocketed, they slam the suitcase closed, check over the room one more time, and bang down the stairs and explode into the pub.

The innkeeper looks up when they run up to the bar and say, “How much to use the Floo portal, fireplace, whatever, I need to contact Hogwarts.”

The man – what’s his name, Tom – blinks at Jules in startled surprise. “Shouldn’t you be on the Express?”

“Yes,” Jules says, exasperated and fast approaching the point of frenzy, “Hence the Floo. How much to use it?”

“Free,” says the good man, “Let me get the powder.”

Outside the window, the golden flash of sunset’s beginning flows over the street. If Jules recalls correctly, the train doesn’t pull into Hogsmeade until after darkness falls. They still have time. A glance around the pub lets them take in the sparse number of patrons, an occupied table here or there, quiet conversation, reading a newspaper in solitude with a cup of something steaming. Tom comes back out and leads them to the fireplace.

He tosses a pinch into the fire and calls for Hogwarts. They both wait a breath, then the floating head of Professor McGonagall appears in the green flames. She says, “Tom, this is a surprise. The students are about to arrive, I haven’t got much time.”

“Not this one,” he says, and puts a hand on Jules’ shoulder to gently push them closer to the fireplace. “Missed the Express.”

“Your name?”

“Jules Zhao,” they say, and it had better be. If they also now inhabit a _completely_ different individual –

McGonagall’s head ducks out of the fire for a moment, then reappears. “First Year Zhao, have you used the Floo Network before?”

“No.”

“Step into the fireplace, I assure you it’s safe, and the open connection will bring you into Hogwarts.”

Magic, Jules thinks with a mad shrug and turns to Tom. “Thank you for setting the connection up.”

They step through the fire.

* * *

Freshman year of college introduced Jules to Kierkegaard and more specifically, the knight of faith which their poor short-term memory immediately bastardized in the fine conceptual philosophical nuances, but still they threw their life philosophy into leaps of faith. This was a step up from the optimistic nihilism they clawed their way into on the cusp of adulthood. “I’m adaptable,” they tell people while rolling with the punches of life and in consuming new planes of knowledge.

They spend the hour waiting for the Express to deliver the rest of the student body sitting in McGonagall’s office, _adapting_.

Dreams move swiftly, from one bizarre sequence of actions to another dark scene. Intangibility rules supreme in dreams, with a weightless gliding. Jules smacks a fist against the desk’s surface. Their hand connects with a solid _thunk_. No, this is not a dream, as they knew from the first confused step onto Diagon Alley. They aren’t going to wake up out of this universe, there’s no telling if there’s any chance they can travel back home.

McGonagall sent off Jules’ luggage on their arrival and they’re not about to start riffling around the office, even with boredom sending them twitching. No scraps of paper to doodle on, no books to read. They stuff their hands into their pockets and sink further into the wooden chair to wait. The wand bumps against their right hand and they rub the crooked bends and dips in the wood.

Adapting. What year is this? Or rather, which year is this, because come to think about it, Jules doesn’t even know which years spanned the books. The 1990’s, but which one slotted with which new attempt on Harry Potter’s life?

The door opens with McGonagall’s return. “Come along Zhao, the other first years are arriving.”

They follow her through the castle and okay, forget remembering which year it is, first order of business, they’re mapping this castle out. The interiors of certain buildings already confuse Jules’ sense of direction and that was before the halls and staircases start moving around on the regular. They walk past paintings and tapestries and torches and Jules takes it all in, head turning from side to side in grudging appreciation. All the architecture and decorations, including the rows and rows of armor, hold an old, charged ambience, an aesthetic, half like a museum. Jules can see afternoons in the future spent wandering around for the best views and vistas, hunting for a composition to sketch or paint.

As they descend the levels to the ground floor, the noise of a crowd grows, the white noise of conversations blurring together in a high hall. With one last sigh, Jules resigns to repeating middle and high school all over again and sinking back into the grips of puberty.

McGonagall reaches the front doors and opens them and Jules’ instinctual alarm in the presence of taller people flares at the sight of Hagrid because reading about half-giants is one thing, _seeing _one in person is another. Then they snap their gaze down to the other first years, their classmates, oh no, and like a slap of in face, Jules realizes how young they all are. How young the whole student body is going to be. They’re more than a decade older than these children.

What’s worse, Jules discovers further while McGonagall herds the pack into a side chamber and gives the introductory speech, Harry Potter, the boy himself, stands in the crowd. Yes, this is the first book: there’s Ron Weasley with a crown of red hair, Hermione Granger breaking into the mutters of cramming, Draco Malfoy, and more.

This is the Potter’s first year, which means plot has moved beyond the horizon and right onto Jules’ doorstep. Death, chaos, supremacists.

Basilisks, stones, government take overs, curses, murders –

_No_, Jules declares viciously in the angry, buzzing swarm of their disturbed thoughts. _Absolutely not_.

* * *

Jules puts on the Sorting Hat last of the first years.

“Well,” says a small voice, soft and muffled, “I’ve never seen anything quite like you before.”

I imagine not, they think back wryly, this is highly unprecedented. A thought jolts them.

“No, I also think it best to keep your history a small secret between the two of us. A fictional universe, hmm? Fascinating. With your thirst for knowledge, you can fit right in with Ravenclaw, but it’s not the passion to learn that motivates you. And,” the hat laughs, “I see you wish for a change of pace from something so academically driven. Your ambition is commendable, and you’ll need your honor and pride in spades in SLYTHERIN!”

They wince at the volume and set the Sorting Hat onto the stool, striding with a blank expression to the table applauding while studying them with a low thrum of suspicion. Once they take a seat in an empty spot near the table’s end, Dumbledore stands up to talk, but Jules doesn’t listen, too busy wrestling thoughts into order. Clambering their way up through school and into work – if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere – sure, ambitious. The workaholic drive of the second half of their life, twelve-hour days, eighty-hour, hundred-hour weeks, sure ambitious.

A voice cuts across their attention. “What family are _you_ from?”

Jules glances up at the girl next to them. Other students tip their faces towards them, and other eyes flicker over. From waking up in a different universe, to the baffling Diagon Alley, to the excitement of scrambling to Hogwarts, to shifting through their spotty memory of plot, its been a long day and about to get longer. “Since you even had to ask,” they say, cold, to the watching faces Jules doesn’t know the names of, “what do you think? I believe the term is Muggleborn.”

They bite down hard on the next forkful of food as the children flinch back and the shocked and scandalized mutters fly up and down the ranks.

In praising Jules’ ambition, the Sorting Hat wasn’t referring to their old life. No, it referred to the burning indignation running through Jules, that like _hell_ was Jules going to die thanks to some fictional megalomania with murderous delusions of grandeur. They knock back a drink while staring down the kids edging away from the gantlet they threw down.

Plotting to near singlehandedly kill Voldemort out of self-preservation could certainly count as ambition.

* * *

Jules’ first day of class starts with petty attempts at sabotage from their roommates: the bed’s curtains pinned shut, random items tossed on the floor in their way, hogging the time in the bathroom. They don’t in the least remember the kids’ names, though some alliteration with the letter P comes to mind. Flowers, Pansy, okay one of them is named Pansy. Jules will just keep an eye out for whichever of these girls chums with Malfoy the most. The kids try ditching Jules on the way to breakfast, but they remember the route from last night. Then they try shaking Jules off on the way to classes, but one of Jules strides covers two of theirs and they don’t succeed. This proves to be the day’s excitement as the professors mostly run through drudgery of first day logistics and syllabi.

Mostly though, the Slytherins as a whole seem to be trying their hardest in ignoring Jules’ existence, like cats ignoring messes they’ve made. The Perfects only speak curtly to them, and the older students avoid engaging in any conversation. The bulk of any harassment comes from the other first years, but even then, they primarily follow Malfoy’s lead and the boy guns at the larger target of Harry Potter. The kid, Jules observes with dry bemusement when he heckles Potter during mealtimes, is basically obsessed. Jules wouldn’t trade positions with Potter in this regard for a second.

And so, the first week passes at an easy trot, with simple classes intended for eleven-year-old minds, exploring the shifting and possibly sentient castle, and tearing their way through all their textbooks. Malfoy peacocks like the birds he grew up around, the children and teenagers act like children and teenagers with the tiny concerns of children and teenagers, and Jules ignores everything so their mind can turn over plans and ideas in an unending stream of plots.

Friday swings around, with a whole afternoon of free time in the library to look forward to after Potions in the morning and well. Potions.

By the miracle of waking up at dawn to explore the castle while there aren’t classmates underfoot, Jules makes it to Snape’s classroom early. He’s also already there, studying papers on his desk, blackboard wiped pristinely clean, desks in neat rows. They rub their fingers against the room’s numbing chill and greet him with, “Good morning, Professor.”

“Have a seat, Zhao,” he says without even a twitch to look up at them.

They take a desk towards the front center, pulling out their cauldron, paper, and quill. Their bag slips under the desk to lean against a leg. Then, with ten more minutes before the other students are likely to start arriving, they ignore Snape’s directions and silently drift to the walls and cupboards to examine ingredients and skeletons on display.

Unfortunately, Jules barely remembers the events of Potter’s sixth year in the books and they have no idea where he dug up Snape’s old textbook. Even if they’re far from beginning to reach a level of competency where they could learn from it, the notes will be exceedingly useful. They run a finger along the spines of books on the shelves. This isn’t the time to go hunting yet, with only a few chattering kids to barely distract Snape from any suspicious activity Jules gets up to.

The whole class eventually arrives, and the debacle of Potter’s first potions class is worse than Jules remembered. From the perspective of a teenage narrator, Jules always vaguely assumed Snape marched closer to middle age, but seeing the man himself before them, they realize he’s really only a few years older than them. Stress and sour attitudes probably helped age his face, but Snape’s in his early thirties. Grilling Potter, ignoring Hermione, pecking at everyone is just supremely _petty_.

If only he wasn’t such a damn good potions master and dark arts practitioner, Jules thinks with a surly scowl as Tracey Davis snaps at them, “You better not mess this up.”

Jules sweeps the snake fangs into the cauldron with more precise anger than necessary. _To hell with you too_.

* * *

On Jules’ first weekend in Hogwarts – and incidentally in this awful universe – they learn the following: certain unused classrooms aren’t actually that unused and should _not_ be broken into when doors are mysteriously locked; Ravenclaws are far too presumptuous over rights to library books; ebony, dragon heartstring wands are far too eager to make use of their pent up frustration and anger; and at eleven years old, their body is almost back at their peak physical strength.

The predawn mornings are for Jules alone. Mist rolls over the field and mountains and the sunlight shivers through the dense magic surrounding the castle. A few pins and modifications make their robes less of a hassle while running down the gentle hills on the grounds, around the lake, along the forest, and past the quidditch field. Sometimes Hagrid or Professor Spout are up and tending to plants and Jules waves to them as they cross paths.

“Yer up early. You always get up with the sun?” Hagrid asks on Sunday while Jules accepts a much-appreciated cup of water.

They shrug. Pansy tried to stuff their suitcase into the trash collection bin the other afternoon and Jules blew up a few of her presents from home learning how to perform a sticking charm. They caught Daphne preparing to pour ink over their borrowed textbooks and sometime soon, the two of them are going to convince Malfoy to stop harassing Potter long enough for them to borrow Crabbe and Goyle for some rough up.

It bears repeating once again for Jules’ own sanity that they are almost as tall as Snape, far taller than the other first years, and also far more vicious. So far, it hasn’t been worth their time and energy to retaliate against a bunch of children with _baby fat_. But Jules didn’t take any attempts at bullying lying down the first time around at age eleven and they don’t plan on entertaining the nuisances for much longer this time either.

They answer to Hagrid, “I like having the time to myself. Exercising clears my head.”

“Hmm.” He eyes their green edged clothing. “How’re yer classmates?”

They smile like a shark. “As well as expected.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Jules personally uses they/them pronouns, they don't have any energy or care to explain that to the people around them or learn about how the LGBT community functions in the British magical community. As such, as far as any of the other characters know, they go by she/her. 
> 
> Jules has much bigger priorities.


	2. PART ONE: Andante con moto (A♭ major)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it turns out Jules forgets a lot of minor details from book one's plot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for some minor animal death. Mentions of scalpels and knives. See end note for more details.

Over the first ten days of the semester, Malfoy receives in the mail: for certain, three boxes of rich chocolates, a pen knife with a carved ivory handle for sharpening quills, a liberal smattering of other sweets, a heavy coat of wool and tasteful fur, and what might be wizarding children’s games and allegedly, a wand holster, golden scales for potions, and an autographed golden snitch. Since Jules hasn’t seen a wisp or a peep of the last three items, they assume they don’t exist.

What Malfoy also receives in the morning mail is petty entertainment. Jules sweeps an eye over the owls descending over breakfast, trying to see if any are heading their way, while a commotion brews at the Gryffindor table. The birds settle down, none with them, although one tail is closer to the jam than they’d like, and they look down, in time to catch a red ball held high in Malfoy’s hand.

Right. That. Maybe Jules should do something about this. Professor McGonagall intervenes before Jules can stick a hand into their bookbag and rummage around for a coin to flip.

As per custom for the last few days, Jules stands up and exits the Great Hall while the stragglers are still trudging in for the morning meal. Eating so quickly isn’t manners, but there are books calling their name before classes start. They almost managed to lift a quill the night before.

Classes for the day go as expected: boring. Their pureblood classmates shift restlessly, bored hearing basic material they learned through their upbringing in magical households. Some of the halfbloods are in a similar predicament and the professors confiscate paper notes by the half hour. Thankfully, the staff don’t slow down the Slytherin only lessons for Jules’ sole benefit, though in mixed-house classes with more children from nonmagical families, there’s a distinct drag. Jules blinks lethargically at the chalk floating and writing on the board by itself as Professor Flitwick goes on another bullet point about wand safety.

The afternoon bell releases the Slytherin first years to clear skies and light breezes. Jules’ longer legs naturally bring them to the front of the pack as they approach Madam Hooch’s waiting figure. They reach her first, says, “Good afternoon, Madam Hooch.”

“Good afternoon.”

The children catch up in clusters. Jules nudges a broomstick with their foot, thoughts wandering. Mr. Weasley proved that other objects could act as flying modes of transportation and they think they remember something about flying carpets. Hagrid has a flying motorbike and actually, how did Sirius get his hands on that in the middle of a war in the first place? The Knight Bus probably cheats with a bit of flying help too. If they look, Jules bets they can also find flying bicycles and with time, if not already, there are probably flying skateboards too. So why stick with broomsticks? Also, back on the modified vehicles, why _is_ it that magic and electronics apparently don’t mix?

The Gryffindors arrive on the heels of the thought,_ does Mr. Weasley even know how to use a gas pump?_

Madam Hooch barrels straight into instructions and Jules suffers a brief second bewilderedly wondering how this was now their life and commands to a broomstick that desperately needs a trim and some polish, “Up.”

It hops. They sigh.

Jules presses their thoughts into a firmer ball of words and impressions. They do want to fly and experience the height. With a thicker cloak wrapped around their shoulders and a warming spell cast on a scarf pulled over their mouth and nose, they’d love skimming the low-lying clouds sinking onto the mountains, laden with rain. And as ridiculous as broomsticks are, the wizarding world obviously works with a tenacious “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset, so broomsticks it will have to be.

“_Up._”

The wooden shaft slaps against their palm with a satisfying smack.

But seriously, why not typewriters, Jules prods at the ideas as their instructor goes up and down the line, adjusting grips and delivering directions like ammunition. Their handwriting sucks, typewriters don’t have to be electronic, some tweaking with magic can secure non-drying, ever-lasting ink and erase mistakes without dragging out the whiteout. There are wizarding newspapers, there are obviously printing presses, why can’t there also be typewriters?

Madam Hooch returns to the front of the class. Jules wrestles their attention back to the matter at hand and _wait a moment_ -

Neville Longbottom shoots up into the air like a rocket and oh _hells_, oh _fuck_, why isn’t she casting a cushioning charm, why isn’t she slowing the fall, isn’t she a _grown witch_ in charge of eleven-year-olds, _what the hell is the charm, they don’t know it. _

Jules isn’t aware of running forward, broom discarded and forgotten, but they are aware of the crack and their shuddering wince.

“Need any help?” they ask their instructor, over Neville’s gasps and the tears bubbling up.

“No, I’ll be taking him to the hospital wing. The rest of you!” She stands, supporting half of the boy while Jules hauls up the other half. “You leave those brooms where they are or you’ll be out of Hogwarts before you can say ‘Quidditch.’ Miss Zhao, stay with your house. Come on, dear.”

As the figures of Madam Hooch and Neville approach the open doors of Hogwarts’ front entrance, a jeer rises behind them, “That oaf of a crybaby. Thinking about changing houses, Zhao?”

“You see his big fat face?”

You are not allowed to wallop children in the face with broomsticks, Jules hollers internally. Fists clench tight as the yells rise behind their back. You are not allowed to slug an untrained kid in a fist fight.

“Come and get it!”

They whirl around to watch Malfoy and Potter rise into the air. Oh, right. This also happens.

The rest of their first flying lesson is effectively canceled.

* * *

Out of severely misplaced guilt – it was _not_ Jules’ responsibility to know how to slow a fall or transfigure the ground into a cushion – they visit Neville in the hospital wing after snagging their fill from dinner with their usual speed. Thankfully, instead of making a fool of themselves, the kid’s still there. He even has a tray with dinner balanced on his lap and given the fork and knife he’s wielding, both wrists are working.

“Hey, uh,” Jules stumbles and twists the strap of their messenger bag in a death grip. “You feeling better?”

“Um. Yeah. Madam Pomfrey fixed it up pretty quickly though it’s still kinda sore.” He eyes them warily with a forkful of chicken partially lifted from his plate. “Why are you here?”

They shrug. “You broke your wrist. Normally, that’ll have you in a cast for a while. Dang, magic makes it fast huh.”

“But you’re a Slytherin.”

And now they’re scowling. “And you’re my classmate and you just had a traumatic event. You broke your wrist. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“I was nervous and -”

“No, why didn’t Madam Hooch cast a cushioning spell or something to slow you down or thicken the air or any other kind of protective spell. I know those exist.”

At a loss and absolutely bewildered, the boy shrugs in turn. “Uh.”

“Finish your dinner.” They drag a chair over and wince at the screech of its feet scraping against the tile floor. With more theatrical force than necessary, they take a seat and yank a library book on transfiguration out of their bag.

Seven pages later, silverware clinks against the porcelain plate. “Um.”

“Someone should be visiting,” is all they say, and they flip to the next page.

About a quarter of an hour later, Madam Pomfrey comes by for Neville’s final assessment. The kid’s pronounced free to go. Broken wrist fixed in just – Jules checks the clock hanging over the hospital wing’s entrance – about three hours. That’s still wild.

Before she ducks back into her office, Jules calls out, “Oh, Madam Pomfrey, weird question. I happened to see a funny tapestry the other day of some guy teaching trolls how to dance. But I can’t seem to find it anymore. Do you know where it is?”

“Trolls how to dance?” she asks with one eyebrow raised, because, yeah, seriously, what?

“Specifically, ballet.”

Neville finishes packing his bag and comes out from his curtained bed area while she mulls in consideration. “I believe you can find that on the seventh floor in the left corridor.”

“Great. Thank you, Madam Pomfrey. Ready?” they direct at Neville. He nods. “Cool, let’s go. Have a good night, Madam.”

“Have a good night, dears.”

Students are scattered around the halls, with clubs wrapping up meetings and late stragglers making their way up from dinner back to the dorms. Bangs pop from a classroom they pass by, accompanied with whoops and yelling. The ghost situation still makes Jules uneasy.

“Are you really accompanying me all the way to the tower?”

The pair turn a corner. “Sure, why not? I haven’t got anything better to do.” Not really, a few more hours and this transfiguration book will be finished, and they’ll be wrecking a classroom that _isn’t_ a popular hook up location for some practice. Then Jules might be able to transition over into learning a few elementary hexes that’ll sting Pansy the next time she lays a finger on their belongings. Also, learning the Gryffindor password is probably useless as they don’t know how often it gets changed, but the knowledge will make them feel better anyways.

Then it turns out that Neville doesn’t know the password.

“Sorry dear,” the Fat Lady’s saying as Jules makes gargled noises of frustration in the back of their throat. Neville just stammers and sweats harder.

“But don’t you recognize him? Can’t you see he’s one of your kids?”

The lady’s lips purse in a harrumph. “He must provide the password. Seeing isn’t believing.”

Oh, for goodness sake, right. Polyjuice Potion, shapeshifting, jeez. There’s magic Jules can be learning right now, instead of arguing with a sentient painting.

“Well, can't you see if there’s a perfect inside that can help him out?” Jules presses on the kid’s behalf since he’s in no fit state to make belligerent adult demands.

“I’m really sorry dears, they aren’t in there right now.” She shrugs, what can you do.

“Do you know where they might be?” Jules is arguing with a sentient painting, how _is_ this their life now?

“No.”

Jules scrubs their face in aggressive frustration.

“It’s fine, Zhao, you’ve done enough, I’ll, I’ll get in myself, someone. Someone’s bound to come by, and I can get in with them,” Neville, sweet Neville, tries calming them down with.

Yeah, and then they won’t figure out what the password is. At this point, getting the password is a matter of principle and trying to salvage something from this excursion.

Since neither Neville or the Fat Lady are their brother or their friends or spent any amount of time in their presence, they don’t recognize the expression flashing across Jules’ face. Jules marches across the short distance remaining to her portrait, raises a fist, and begins hammering on the frame. The Fat Lady yelps, “What are you doing?”

“Zhao, what -”

“Someone’s gotta be inside.”

They keep hammering over the Lady’s “The nerve, stop that at once!”

The portrait swings open. Fred and George Weasley stand on the inside and the other Gryffindors in the common room stare incredulously at the scene. Jules grabs Neville by the arm that wasn’t broken and yanks him forward. “Kid forgot the password, tell him what it is so this time he remembers.”

The twins glance at each other in synchronicity and the one on right shakes his head. “We’re not telling him while you’re here, little snake.”

“Run back to your own den,” the other one says.

Jules frowns at them a moment longer, then silently pulls Neville over, helps him into the hole, and pats him on the shoulder. With a curt, “Rest well,” they pivot and walk away. It was a long shot. And they did still have that book to finish before turning in for bed.

* * *

The next morning, a barn owl lands nearly on top of Jules’ corn chowder. Unnervingly close. Its feet tap on the thick envelope it carries. Jules glances at the seal and yup, it’s mail for them. They untie the straps and offer their water to the owl. It drinks, hoots, and flaps off, a couple of feathers landing in their hair even as they flinch back in surprise at the wings suddenly snapping out.

Pushing their bowl away to make room, they drag the package from Gringotts over for inspection. The Great Hall steadily finishes filling up as they break the seal and pull out the documents inside for examination. Balance sheets, account transactions, abysmal interest rate, legal contracts and disclaimers, legal contracts and disclaimers, _more_ legal contracts and disclaimers, eighteen pages of legal contracts and disclaimers, actually. All of it boilerplate fine print they’ll review later. With a frown, they flip back to the front of the pile.

Account of Jules Zhao, balance of Jules Zhao, contracts of – where's their legal guardian? This body is eleven years old, where are their parents or guardians? Surely the wizarding world isn’t fine with entrusting finances to kids barely breaking into the double digits.

A hand plunges into their bag and roots out their Hogwarts acceptance letter. They hold the sheets of paper against each other and, oh no, the addresses are different. Why are the addresses different? A flick to the transaction history shows the account was set up within the last few years, with a few withdrawals every few months. No deposits. Jules squints at the number on the balance line. They still don’t have a solid measure of how much a galleon is worth, but as a kid who’ll need clothing and food over the summer and more school supplies and who knows what other emergencies, the number in bold doesn’t fill them with confidence.

“What’s this?” a voice breaks in and a hand tries to snatch a few sheets of the legalese away. In a move that took Jules several hours too long over the last weekend to practice, they flick out their wand and cast, “_Aguamenti_.” Frigid water hits the hand and its owner yelps. Papers kept safely out of the water’s way, Jules looks to the right at Malfoy shaking water all over himself, their clothing, and a plate of pastries.

“Are you offering to help translate financial contracts?” Jules ask, sharp as needles. “Your father starts that early in teaching you how to inherit and manage the family fortune?”

“What? Why do you have financial contracts?”

Even under pain of death, Jules will never admit that eleven-year-old, still-has-baby-fat Malfoy’s confused face with the slight scrunched nose is slightly endearing. Because seriously, a child. They’re over twice the kid’s age by a solid margin and that’s a slightly distressing thought.

Since the questions aren’t actually that inane, Jules answers, “I’m reviewing my Gringotts account.”

“Why?”

They do not say, because I'm fairly certain my family does not exist in this universe and that may imply my home does not exist either which further implies some extremely dire complications in the near future, first and foremost starting with my lack in income. Instead they say, “Why don’t you go bother Harry Potter? Isn’t he more interesting than little Slytherin Muggleborn abomination me?”

The kid nearly gives himself whiplash twisting around to the Gryffindor table where Potter’s merrily eating breakfast. Potter catches Malfoy’s shocked, open-mouth stare and elbows Ron beside him, laughing, though the sound can't travel through the Great Hall’s din. Malfoy descends into a sputtering fit. Jules arches an eyebrow and takes advantage of his distraction to sweep all their paperwork back into a neat stack and shove into its envelope and the envelope into their bag.

Jules has no idea what’s got the kid so gobsmacked, it’s just Friday morning, they’ll see Potter and company in a few minutes in Potions. Standing up, they nudge his shoulder out of the way. “Right, cool, see you in class Malfoy.”

They beat it before his collects his wits again.

* * *

Jules’ life would be much improved if Potions could have less drama each session, especially from their professor, but alas this is not to be. At least afternoons are off and they grab a sandwich from the Slytherin table at lunch before racing up the stairs to the seventh floor. Five minutes of “where is it, where is it” later, they find the tapestry of trolls trying to escape ballet class.

“_Yes_,” they hiss, scarf down the sandwich, and start pacing.

Like blessed magic, the door pops into existence in the wall. With laughter on the edge of triumphant mania, they wrench the door open and, okay, that’s a lot of junk. Stacks of books, towers of furniture, piles of dirty bottles, a ripped open photo album with paint poured over its pages, and even weapons rise up in a silent labyrinth around Jules. They close the door, tiny in comparison to the vaulted ceiling far in the distance, with a gentle click.

“The physics of this place seriously hurts my head.”

Dust accumulated for generations muffles the sound of their voice and the clacks of their shoes hitting the ground with each step. They aim at the top of the closest stack of books, easily three times their height, and whisper, “_Wingardium Leviosa_.” The top book float into the air and sail into their waiting hands.

Yellowed pages cough up a storm of dust while they run a finger through the volume titled, _Under a Rosemary Garland_. There’s a scantily dressed woman on its front with legs for days and heels tall enough to outclass a ruler. Professor Flitwick could say a thing or two about how close she’s holding her wand by her face, posed for a kiss. Jules grunts in disappointment.

The next few books they lift down follow a similar vein. They stare at the pile of pulp romance novels gathering at their feet. Stare at the landfill of junk stretching on into the room’s giant dimensions.

“Great,” Jules says into the cluttered void and heads back towards the door to convince the room to add a few more square feet so Jules can start tidying things up.

Over the next few hours, Jules makes as much a dent in the towers as prisoners trying to escape a concrete cell make with plastic spoons. Towards the end, they start tiring of levitating things left and right and start summoning objects to them instead, to varying degrees of disaster. There are now rusty swords sticking out of an overstuffed armchair that wasn’t a pincushion twenty minutes ago.

As evening settles, they exit the room and resets its contents. They already tried locating the address on their acceptance letter with the atlases in the library, but Hogwarts hasn’t updated its Muggle maps since the early 1940s.

On reentry, the room’s now all cozy wooden tables and green lampshades. Heavy atlases, large enough to stop bullets, sit on the center table with a podium next to it. Jules hauls the first atlas onto the podium and snorts when they notice candles in the light fixtures instead of light bulbs. “Good try,” they tell the room and flick the page open. And keeps flicking. And keeps flicking.

They move onto the next atlas, frowning now, with both addresses before them, flicking between maps printed just last year, muggle and wizard, and keeps flicking, _where the hell_ –

“Come on, come on, where are you, just give me the street, I have the zip code, where is it, where am I living next summer, _where is it_?”

The last atlas slams shut, and they knock their head onto its paper cover with a groan. “No no no, you must have missed it Jules, come on, start over again.”

If a room could display sentience and be worried, the Room of Requirement was trying its hardest right then. A fireplace pops into life with a smell of pine trees. It gives Jules some more squashy armchairs and whisks away the other tables in the room to make space for flower arrangements. It also dumps several more atlases on Jules’ desk and soon they’re frantically trying to pin down their home which might not exist anymore in the middle of a strange parody of their childhood family room.

After the third try, they admit defeat with their head on the podium, exhausted from spending all afternoon dumpster diving and the frantic energy expelled confirming that they don’t really exist in this universe.

But with night curfew fast approaching, they exit the room, giving the door a fond pat, and clamber down the near dozen set of stairs it takes to reach the Slytherin common room.

* * *

It rains on Sunday, so Jules spends all day back in the Room of Requirement, pacing and dictating notes to a roll of parchment the room helpfully spat up for them to use.

“The most obvious step starts with eliminating the Horcruxes.”

The diary is currently in Malfoy possession. The cup is locked in Lestrange’s vault. The diadem is somewhere in the trash pit version of this room. The ring is in wherever that deathtrap shack is. The locket is at Grimmauld’s. Nagini is an annoying moving target and Potter is downstairs.

Those last two… Jules wanders over to the floor to ceiling windows with a view over the dark canopies of the forbidden forest. “Delegate those last two for last.”

A flock of birds rise with a shudder through the gray sheets draped outside. “I’ll start with the diadem, since it’s right here and I don’t need to wait for an engineered opportunity to deliver it into my hands.” Considering Jules barely finished learning how to summon water, shoot sparks, and superglue objects to walls, they’re not toasting this Horcrux with fiendfyre.

“The cup is,” they wince, “rather out of reach. Grimmauld’s place shouldn’t be too hard to get to. I think most of its protections in the series were thanks to the Order of Phoenix setting up shop there? Hmmm. The ring will be troublesome but can’t take too long. I’m sure it’s near the Riddle mansion and if not, then I’ll just start digging through the records for death certificates for possible locations. I can have all summer for that.”

Rain continues to drum against the windows with a soothing beat. “Question is, do I want to wait for Malfoy senior to dump the diary on Ginny? That would be the easiest way to intercept it. Can’t be too hard to sneak into the Gryffindor rooms and steal it. She might start carrying it around to classes and it’ll be even easier to steal it then. Would really love to not spend a year interrupted by playing death hide and sneak with a giant snake.”

Jules watches the quill scratching away. This room really is too useful.

“As a Slytherin, I highly doubt I’ll be pulling swords of Gryffindor out of hats anytime soon. Not to mention, I can’t remember if the sword itself is enough or if the basilisk venom was what destroys the Horcruxes.”

A stool appears for them to rest on. Really too useful. And clever and – hold on a moment.

“Thanks, that’s enough,” they tell the room and scoops up the parchment, blowing on the ink to dry it faster. Ink all dry, they roll the notes up tight, stuff it into their bag and stride to the door. At the threshold, they hesitate and give the doorframe an awkward pat. “Let’s see what you can do, though this may get gruesome. Sorry.”

Back outside, they start pacing again. Tonight’s dinner should include fish as some of the dishes. If Hogwarts has one good thing going for it, the cafeteria foods remains palatable, thanks in part to how the pantries somehow remain stocked with fresh ingredients. Maybe even live fish.

Third walk by finished, they glance at the unchanged door with trepidation. The door opens as silently as ever, except now the interiors are the sterile white and gray of a lab. There are still candles in place of light bulbs and small mirrors places besides each candle help illuminate the room. The room’s lined up scalpels, tweezers, cotton swabs, and other familiar tools from their anatomy classes in an accusatory row along the central table. The Bunsen burner’s – ha, what? – metal gleam reflects candlelight over the black tabletop like a pointing finger.

Five beheaded fish lay in the center of the table. Jules gives one a tentative poke. It’s still slimy and wet with water, not ice. Blood continues flowing out of the heads.

They requested some decapitated fish pulled from the kitchens and by god they got decapitated fish from the kitchens.

“Wait, how do I return this to the kitchens?”

* * *

On Wednesdays after dinner, Birdwatchers Enthusiasts meets on the fields or in a second-floor classroom for their bimonthly meetings and the Charmed Club meets in Professor Flitwick’s office for practical sessions. Tarot and Tea is petitioning to move sessions from Friday to either Tuesday or Thursday for the third year in a row, while Transfiguration Society guards its slots with draconic jealousy. The needle and craftworks club makes certain everyone knows about its precious spinning wheel straight out of Sleeping Beauty’s nightmares. The greenhouses appear to operate under a free-for-all, first-come-first-serve signup schedule while the astronomy tower remains locked in a strict, “sign these forms in triplicate” rotational. Predictably, there are no Potions or Defense Against the Dark Arts aligned fraternities. Jules counts no less than seven sports clubs, excluding the house quidditch teams. There are also five distinct study groups, all organized by Ravenclaws, with a Ravenclaw fourth year earnestly collecting signatures to charter a sixth.

To Jules’ mild surprise, the first time they really run into Hermione Granger is at one of the already established study groups while they are trying to steal all the upperclassmen’s reading lists.

More precisely, she stumbles across them while they’re in the middle of interrogating a sixth-year club organizer. They’re pointing at a pair of seventh-year Hufflepuffs tossing a ball of crumpled parchment back and forth with flicks of their wand, holding a distracted conversation while issuing nonverbal commands. “Is it a matter of control? What does it take to do silent magic? Why do wands make it easier to do magic? Tiny kids can do all sorts of weird impulsive stuff, how does that get translated into the magic we learn here. Why do we have to shout all these commands?”

“Look, it’s a bit complicated and the magical theory is really beyond what you’ve learned within your first week. The words help guide and, yes, control the will of the caster. That’s why during the first few years, precise pronunciation is imperative –”

“Are you not hearing my American accent?” Jules interrupts with morbid fascination. “There is no way the different accents of America are going to align with modern British tones. Even within the U.K. pronunciations change and that’s not touching at all on how dialects and phonetics change over time within a region. Also, wouldn’t Slavic and Asian languages have different spells? How much wiggle room is there on pronunciation really?”

The Ravenclaw’s face folds in a hassled attempt to construct a high-level explanation. “Fair, but you can’t run before you learn how to walk. Saying the spells helps concentrate the mind and clear out distractions at the moment of casting. Underage magic is unfocused and inconsistent due to the lack of discipline learned through incantation.”

“So, it’s just a matter of determination and will.”

“Boiled down to the bottom of the cauldron, approximately.”

There’s also probably a dash of words carrying power thanks to literary narrative devices. Jules nods. “Cool. Thanks.”

The Ravenclaw smiles, tells them no problem, and hustles to the other side of the room where a desk has – hopefully accidentally – been set on fire.

“Isn’t it a bit early to try performing nonverbal magic? They don’t teach that until sixth year after your OWLs,” a voice pipes up next to Jules.

They glance over and with a grin more akin to a smirk, say, “Never too early to have your eye on a goal. Hello, Hermione Granger.”

She blinks. Carefully sounding the words, she says, “Hello, Jules Zhao.”

“Have you finished all your homework yet?” they ask, making a spur of the moment decision.

“Well, yes, why –”

“Great, so have I. Come with me,” Jules cuts over her response and swings their bookbag onto their shoulder.

Mastering the interior logic of Hogwarts architecture took longer than Jules preferred, but its been enough time that Jules leads Hermione with reasonable confidence up a flight of stairs. She’s full of questions, Hermione, and they come out, “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere cool.”

“Where is it?”

“Seventh floor, bit of a climb still.”

“What is it?”

“Something cool, I just said.”

“Are you trying to trick me into getting into trouble?”

Jules freezes on the stairs up to the sixth floor and turns towards her. Hermione frown wields disapproval as well as their frowns wield ire. “Jeez, Granger, didn’t know you thought so lowly of me. No, I just want to show you something I found that I don’t think many people know about. Think you’ll like it to. It’s as harmless as you want it to be.”

They can’t claim in good faith that the room is entirely harmless. They’ve been decapitating larger and larger clay beings and performing all kinds of swell magic tricks with it lately. With a little more coaxing, they might be able to convince it to help them sneak out a few books from the library’s forbidden section.

The kid doesn’t budge. “Well, all the other Slytherins haven’t shown a lot to trust. Why are you showing me this?”

Jules pumps a fist in bland hurrah, dead pan expression on their face, “Muggleborns united.”

That knocks her off guard enough that Jules darts out a hand before she finishes processing and starts reacting and tugs her further along the stairs. “Come on, it’s really neat.”

Hermione even has questions for why Jules starts pacing in front of the tapestry and they can only reply, “Because magic, I don’t know, the internal logic of all of this leaves much to desire, anyways, that’s not what’s important.”

They open the door that she blinks rapidly at and gestures inside, after you.

Her face lights up when she enters the dumpster and there’s even an adorable gasp. Aw, she’s so tiny and cute. Jules flings their arms open and spins to show it all off, tower of junk and all. “Welcome to the Room of Requirement,” they announce, the ringmaster of their circus, auctioneer of their wares, “the leftovers of generations of Hogwarts staff and students, ours for the picking, finders’ keepers. Something catch your interest? Congratulations, it’s yours! Fair warning, most of its genuine trash and I don’t know how much of it's benignly dangerous, so, you know, be careful. Oh, you might like those books there. Those I’ve already sorted.”

Her head follows Jules’ pointed finger then returns its gaze to them. “Is there anything you’re looking for in particular? This place is huge, and I didn’t read anything about a Room of Requirement in _Hogwarts: A History_.”

“Wouldn’t be a secret if this was mentioned in there.” Jules strides over to the pile of decaying clothing they started on last time they visited. “I’m looking for general stuff: things that are useful, things that can sell, a sense of organization. This place is an awful _mess_ after all and that bothers me.”

“Things that can sell?” What’s with that flavor of accusation in her voice?

“Yeah, you can get a cut too.” This dress doesn’t deserve anything other than the fire. Jules tosses it with the other rags. Silence continues emanating from the kid. They glance over their shoulder into their narrowed stare. “I need money, you get advanced, first edition books on magical theory. Wins for all of us.”

The books sway her. Forty minutes and a pile of maybe cursed costumes later, Jules checks back on Hermione and finds her hungrily reading a book that evidently distracted her from sorting. They leave her at it.

A few hours later, Hermione’s stomach growls first. Jules glances up from a set of knives – not goblin made, not good enough – to see her flushing and a quarter of the way further through the book. “Dinner time?” they ask.

“Yes, please,” she answers still flushing.

“Great.” They help her up from the floor and walk to the tiny door. “I come here every Sunday after interrogating the Ravenclaws at the study club, want to join me?”

Why’s the kid still flushing? “Yes, please,” she squeaks.

* * *

Jules didn’t enjoy pumpkin anything when they were eleven the first time and they’re barely learning to like it this time around. Sure, it smells good, but one terrible accident with homemade pumpkin ice cream as a brat and they’re sworn off the ingredient forever.

The live bats everywhere serve entertaining distraction from the food that thank goodness is edible, unlike every Thanksgiving lunch American schools ever tried to serve them. Bland still, because this is Scotland and Jules prefers nearly every meal with a dash of pepper flakes or chili oil, but edible.

Then Professor Quirrell comes running in, yelling about trolls.

Jules allows a single second of regret for leaving Hermione to the troll and crushes it once it makes its point. Sure, the kid’s been sweet enough and a weird remix of their brother and half their classmates growing up, but Jules has bigger fish to fry. Book one’s plot has nearly nothing to do with their end game and the trio needs to form up already. Like hell is Jules going to mess up a perfectly manufactured scene for a bunch of kids that comes out fine in the end.

They follow their housemates, slipping between the upperclassmen and through the group. The perfects open the door back into the common room and everyone piles in. Going by the food laid out, whisked from the Great Hall, the house elves beat them to arrival.

Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle lay claim on a pair of sofas, dragging pies onto the nearby table. Pansy and her group settle down by the fireplace. A cluster of maybe fourth years break out a chess set and start hooting bets and taunts. There’s a corner of last-minute crammers blindly passing food into their mouths while scribbling notes with the other hand.

It occurs to Jules, as they lean against the cool glass of the windows peering into the Great Lake’s depth, that this might be the longest they spent in the common room with their house since the first night they arrived. No one else gets up at dawn and they breeze in and out of the showers after their morning workouts too quickly for the girls to catch them. At mealtimes, they spend no longer than ten minutes at the table before running off to the library or a practice room or the Room of Requirement. They stay out at evenings until as close to curfew as they can, and being eleven-year-olds, their roommates tend to be asleep by the time they silently return. They’ve been here two months and barely know the people they’re supposed to be living with.

Malfoy clocks into their presence when Jules nears the end of their ice cream. He smirks and rallies Crabbe and Goyle’s attention. “Hey Zhao, what are you doing here? I thought they said the troll was outside the dormitories?”

This ice cream really is confoundingly delicious. Maybe there are local cows? They’ve proven through the Room of Requirement that Hogwarts has a slightly alarming stock of incredibly fresh goods in its pantries.

“Or maybe we can slow the troll down by feeding you to it. Though your blood might give the poor thing indigestion.”

Their wand flicks out, casual, loose, and they set down their now empty bowl. Under the clink of the porcelain setting against the marble tabletops, they murmur, “_Rictusempra_.”

Malfoy doubles over, wheezing with laughter. If the kid finds this funny, he might as well be laughing.

Between stabbing a few people with ballpoint pens during grade school in retaliation for slights against their honor, several fistfights and incidences of flying into red-vision rage, and their general pervasive axe to grind against life’s decisions, Jules is aware of their anger issues, thank you. Not breathtakingly destructive like the incredible Hulk, yet not great either. Age mellowed out most of their problems with stress and clinical depression, but this body hasn’t had the proteins and molecules searing their brain into a functional mess yet. It’s almost nice.

At first, Crabbe and Goyle had joined Malfoy’s laughter, but when the tickling toppled him off the couch, their brains clicked into worry and they start reaching out to the boy, asking, you okay? Malfoy bats away their hands, slowly gaining control of himself. With one last wheeze, he gathers himself and sits up to get back onto the couch and startles at Jules’ face just a few feet above his, staring down.

Pansy’s clutch and the chess crew silently settle to watch.

Malfoy withstands Jules’ blank-eyed stare for only another millimeter in the hourglass and snaps, “What’s that look for?”

With the emotional depth of a blank sheet of parchment, they answer, “A moment of reflection on my personal inadequacies for this situation.”

The boy obviously has no frame of reference for handle such a reply. His face churns through expressions of confusion and distrust.

Good god, they think, these kids are all _babies_. Were the class of first years yanked into the architecture of the American public-school system, they’d all be – Jules clicked through the math – all be in fourth grade.

“Let me make something clear for you,” Jules says, deathly calm, because this is a child and this is a room full of children, and Jules doesn’t have the time or energy for this, they have a big task ahead of themselves the day after tomorrow. “I don’t care what your father thinks, I don’t care what your mother thinks, I don’t care what you think about me and my parentage. I don’t care about petty and flailing attempts at bullying. I don’t care about playground spats and taunts. I don’t care about getting into arguments.

“What I care about is getting what needs to be done, done. Cleanly. Efficiently. Effectively. Quickly. I don’t care about the blood purity nonsense you all were raised on until you get in my way enough, you try to command my attention and concentration enough with annoying fly bites. Then I’ll care, and I’ll make the flies go away completely. Judiciously. Irrecoverable.

“Do you understand?”

Malfoy clambers to his feet and aw, look at him, he’s more than a head shorter than Jules, and they can see the kid tasting the words he learned for who know what family members and friends, spits out, “You can’t speak to me like that, you,” tries the word out one more time, settles on “Muggleborn.”

They grin, low, slow, revealing one tooth then another, canines and too many in total, “Adorable. I’m just here for you to help me help you, Malfoy. Do you understand?”

His eyes dart to the perfects watching silently from the side of the room. His eyes dart to them. Dart down, the wand is hidden back up the sleeve already, long ago, like it never flew out and struck.

They give him one last try. “I don’t get in your way; you don’t get in my way. You help me; I help you. Understand?”

There’s a pendulum powered clock ticking somewhere. He nods in a tiny jerk. Their grin doesn’t fade. “Great. You should really have some of this ice cream, it’s delicious.”

* * *

Jules polishes the hand mirror one last time. Ideally, this won’t be necessary, but frozen into a block of stone trumps dead any day. At worse, Hermione will stumble across their petrified body tomorrow when she swings by.

They pat the wall where the door will appear and begin pacing.

Whoever constructed the Room of Requirement were geniuses. Jules had asked for head cuts off, eyes cleanly removed, cloth draped this way and that, and the room kept delivering. For the hell of it, they once requested a full setup for a still life study: out of season flowers, skulls, fruits, polished bowls, maybe a chunk of cheese or two, lace and smooth fabric piled all over a table. Between the overly specific details and Jules aphantasia, the room ran into some difficulties, but delivered the gist well enough.

The door blooms on the wall. Jules tilts the hand mirror this way and that one last time, swallows a breath, then opens the door, Perseus entering Medusa’s lair.

The head is … larger than Jules expected. Yards and yards of black fabric spool out over the sterile white floor tiles. The mirror sweeps this way and that, checking that the heavy opaque cloth covers the whole spectacle. It does, and Jules releases a relieved sigh.

They slip on dragonhide gloves lifted from the dumpster pit and reinforced by a bewildered seventh year Ravenclaw. The hand mirror goes on the metal rolling table, next to the rows of vials they have at the ready. Finally, they turn around to look at the giant lump directly. The top of the head, they assume it’s the top of the head, is taller than they are by several hands so. About ten feet tall. “Guh.”

They begin patting the fabric, wary of teeth and other venomous, murder fluids. Their toes tap against the walls of the tub the head sits in. Smooth, smooth, ah, there, pit. Wet pit? They bring a candle over and shine it on the fabric. Wet pit. Circling to the other side reveals the wet pit quicker. Those eyeballs better be pulp and hopefully still in the Chamber of Secrets.

Inching the fabric off, green scales shine in the candlelight. They glance back into the hand mirror when the cloth reaches where the eyes should be and the sigh of relief when they reveal the distinct lack of eyes shudders through them. Great, excellent.

A metal pole wrenches and holds the jaw open and that’s a lot of teeth.

The rest of their Saturday descends into slowly and cautiously dismantling the basilisk for parts in the frigid room. If Jules can find a way to sell the blood, skin, bones, and venom on the black markets from the head alone, this can handle part of their income issue. Maybe enough rake in enough cash to find an authentic goblin-forged knife to soak in a vial of venom. Should the trial run work, they’ll find a way to finagle Potter into a terrifying field trip for the rest of the parts before it rots too far.

They had considered selling through Professor Snape, but there lies the path of interrogations and mind reading. Too much effort. It’ll remain as Plan C.

They’re lucky that just last week Hermione and they found a rolling cabinet with drawers that are bigger on the inside. Sure, one wheel’s broken and almost half of the shelves are stuck, but it doesn’t vanish anything they put into it, and Jules needs the space. The head alone is far larger than a grown man. The rest of the body’s going to be gigantic.

Pleased and far past curfew, Jules collapses into bed after a long day’s hard work. So of course the next afternoon brings a spanner thrown in the works.

Ron Weasley and Harry Potter shift uneasily under Jules’ glare. Hermione has her lips pinched in a flat, defiant glare of her own.

“You all got attached quickly enough,” they mutter. With a sigh and louder, they say, “Fine, more hands can help out plenty. Plus, I’m certain the Weasley twins have contacts that can help sell these things or make something even more interesting out of the scraps. I still need a couple hundred more galleons.”

“What do you need that much money for?” Ron asks warily.

Jules starts pacing before the door, _the room, the room, the room_, and tells him with a shrug, “There’s something expensive I want to buy as soon as possible.”

The door pops into existence and the boys jump. Pulling the door open, they gesture at the kids, “After you.”

Hermione scampers in first, darting straight to the piles of books expanding and conquering the wall. Ron and Harry follow at a more sedated pace, craning their heads this way and that to take in the labyrinth of junk.

“Forget Fluffy,” Ron says, “If someone hides something here, no one’d ever find it.”

Jules blinks. Who the hell is Fluffy?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-graphic descriptions of Jules decapitating some fish and the basilisk. Uh, they also make certain they removed the basilisk’s eyes. 
> 
> The working title for this chapter was “Jules Murders a Snake, Part One”


	3. PART ONE: Scherzo: Allegro (C minor)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the words “moderation” and “pacing” don’t exist in Jules’ dictionary.

Because it’s the 1990’s, most of Jules’ favorite songs don’t exist yet. Because it’s the wizarding world, most of Jules’ favorite classical symphonies aren’t in Hogwarts’ meager collection of a music library in mediums other than sheet music. Because Jules can’t catch a break over how much they miss the world wide web – CERN's only developed the protocols for a few years here – and smartphones and being under constant government and corporate surveillance, Hogwarts doesn’t have a single record player. As a pack of blood supremacists, the Slytherin house don't have many magic compatible radios. The halfbloods that do own sets aren’t sharing.

“But there is a way for me to get shopping catalogues through the library, right?” Jules asks Madam Pince, nearing the end of their short rope.

“Not Muggle ones,” she says, ugh.

“Which ones could I get through the library?”

In the books, Hermione ran to the school library for answers so often that Jules slowly crystalized the idea that it was a research library, of the sorts they find on university campuses. There’s a restricted section that teenagers barely have any right messing with. So when they first started prodding shelves and, wow, card catalog, that’s a new experience, they assumed there would be useful content for research.

Considering there was never any mention of adult academics or researchers visiting the library or making requests, along with the fact that children should find use out of the books, Jules should have known better. A college library, the Hogwarts library is not. A school library, like the one in their middle schools and high schools, it is. Madam Pince is going to become quite familiar with their wide and many esoteric demands. At least she’s able to request more advanced books from other libraries outside Hogwarts.

Twenty-eight minutes and several pamphlets later, the two unearth the mailing address of a tiny shop in somewhere Germany that might specialize in convincing extremely old-school and rudimentary Muggle technology to play nice with magic. It takes a further two minutes to find someone in America that can sell Jules a typewriter.

The librarian collects the papers and scattered parchment with a pinched expression and says, “There are spells for sheet music to play themselves and all your classes are still going to demand handwritten assignments.”

“I’m not handwriting a whole book,” Jules informs her and stuffs the two letters they wrote with her assistance into their bag. “Thank you for your help, Madam Pince.”

* * *

Now that Hermione forged a bond stronger than titanium with Harry and Ron, she stops appearing at the various Ravenclaw study groups. True, she’d never been a strong presence in the first place, preferring the library to the chaos of procrastinators goofing off, but it still takes away one of Jules’ few conversation partners that aren’t wholly focused on classwork. Jules starts trailing off from the group sessions too.

There’s the cabinet of basilisk parts Jules needs to sell as soon as possible and the diadem still lurking in the junk yard. The typewriter and electronic knickknacks should be arriving soon, and they want their preliminary notes in order and ready for when they start cribbing from video games and making magitek. There’s the nest of maps and blueprints they’re gathering in preparation of serial trespassing and eating up their funds with postage stamps. Jules also needs to consider if and how they should, ah, tie up loose ends and operatives that helped Voldemort’s weird bath of life. Their time is better spent outside the club meetings.

Since Hermione and her new friends never go out of their way to interact with Jules in the halls, at meals, or during shared classes, they half expect a no show when the next Sunday dumpster diving session comes around. Yet to their pleasant surprise, while Jules eats another sandwich swiped from the lunch tables, a set of footsteps approach on the heels of conversation.

“Yo.” They wave at the kids. Potter waves back, the conversation stifled.

Jules already has the door materialized and lets them all in. “So,” they say, though they think they can guess, “what were you talking about? Charms homework? Transfiguration reading? Something more exciting?”

Potter opens his mouth first, but Hermione beats him to the punch, hastily saying, “Just some books from the library and Harry’s upcoming Quidditch match.”

They glance over at her biting her lip. As a child used to candid and stringent adherence to rules, Hermione has barely any practice at lying and doing cover ups. Harry’s closing in and mulish, while Ron struggles with an innocent face, nodding along. Yeah, they’re definitely still circling around the Philosopher’s Stone. Jules laughs. “Well, technically, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, given house loyalties, but good luck Potter.”

Hell if Jules really understands or cares about the games, but they’ve been seeing the various teams practicing while on their morning runs. Sometimes the Hufflepuff team lets them continue doing their jogging up and down the stadium seats’ stairs, though all the other teams have chased them off, especially the Gryffindors.

“Thanks,” he says.

Somewhere between a pair of grand pianos, one with half its strings gone and the other with its keyboard smashed in half, buried under a pile of chairs and chipped tea sets, Jules maneuvers their banter with Hermione onto the topic of communicating with animals. “Well, the mail owls understand human speech quite well and I’m certain some pets more magically inclined understand our words better than your regular dog,” they’re saying. “But that’s one direction, I’m curious about bidirectional.”

Hermione heaves a skeleton model of a – no idea – thing off a tiny table and onto a patch of empty ground, breath leaving her with a _whuff_. Jules eyes the skeleton speculatively. There’s definitely plenty of Muggles that will buy that as a curio. What they’d give for eBay to be up and running. Ron yelps to the side as a dull Persian rug tries to wrap him up. She says, “There’s probably some way to do that, though I haven’t heard how yet.”

“Have you heard about Animagi?” Jules asks as they and Harry wrestle with the scratchy carpet, impeded more than helped by Ron’s limbs flailing everywhere. One of his hands nearly whacks into Harry’s glasses. “They’re wizards and witches that can transform into animals at will. The physics and biology of that makes my head want to explode, but maybe some of them also figured out how to retain the ability to recreate human language while in animal form. Oh, for _heaven’s_ sake, grab that chair there so we can pin this down.”

“Professor McGonagall would probably know all about that.”

“Thanks,” Ron wheezes and rolls away from the rug thrashing under its prison.

Jules tugs their hair back – they need to find someone who cuts hair in the castle – and nods, carrying on, “So a lateral translation of the technique could be applied. Could be cool to know what your pets think or how much Mrs. Norris wants us all disappeared. Or maybe not and it’ll just be disappointing about how bored they are wandering around the house waiting for you to bring out the next meal.”

“It’s more of the boring than the fun,” Harry says. “I’ve talked with animals before.”

_Jackpot_. Hermione leaps on this revealed facet. “Really? How?”

He shrugs and opens a cupboard with peeling gray-blue paint. A family of mice comes running out. “Or at least, I think I did? On my cousin’s birthday I accidentally freed a boa constrictor from a zoo, and it said it would try getting to Brazil because it had never been?”

“Only snakes?” Hermione asks, innocently curious. Jules steps back and lifts the curio skeleton, a faint smirk playing as they watch Ron connect certain dots with Harry’s oblivious nod.

“Because it had never been to – you’re a Parselmouth?” Ron says, surging up from the ground.

“A parsel what?”

“A Parselmouth, you can speak Parseltongue, you can speak to snakes!”

“I – I guess?” stammers Harry. Hermione also watches Ron wig out, confused. Jules huffs at the skeleton. Its base weighs a ton and is much easier putting down than picking up.

Hermione finally speaks up, “Isn’t Parseltongue one of the things Salazar Slytherin was famous for?”

“Why do you think I’m forced to have snakes all over the place? Hey, Potter, help me lift this, I bet there’s a Halloween shop somewhere in Muggle London that’ll love this,” Jules cuts in. “Besides, that’s more of a hereditary, innate ability than a spell. Rather limited use case, just snakes, no dogs, no dolphins, no owls. One, two, three, _hup_.”

Harry staggers under the weight and Jules pulls them away from Ron and Hermione back into the maze before anyone realizes that they could have just levitated, instead of physically carried, the statue away.

They let this little revelation sink into the kid in peace. Only their heavier breaths from hauling their load back towards the entrance and their footsteps sound along the twisting pathway. They both nearly trip on wheezing books and tittering glass globes tumbling down a slope of junk that lost its fight between friction and gravity along the way. After setting the skeleton down, they linger for a few moments so Harry can catch his breath.

“Think you can manage a bit of Parseltongue, now that you know about it?” is the first thing Jules asks them.

He opens and closes his mouth, trying, then shakes his head. Jules hums. “Would having an image of a snake help?”

“Maybe?”

They walk over to their bookbag and yank out a scrap of parchment and their quill. A few minutes of quiet scratching later, they thrust a sketch of a snake on a door to him. “How about ‘open sesame’?”

He takes the sketch with a small, distracted grin. It takes four tries before a hiss comes out instead of “open.”

Jules claps, they can’t help it. “_Wicked_.”

* * *

Jules cannot discern how, but somehow Malfoy learns that Jules spends a substantial amount of time in Harry and crew’s presence. Sour on Slytherin’s loss in the Quidditch season’s opening match, he starts saying gems like, “You’re a traitor to your house, Zhao.”

They glance over at him in amusement between transforming ice straight into steam and back. At the front of the room, McGonagall’s critiquing the speed and evenness of her spell work. Smiling, they say, “Hardly. I’m opportunistic, not traitorous.”

“It’s bad enough there’s clear favoritism,” here he glares at the professor’s back, “with all these people falling to their knees for him.”

He puts a little too much stabbing motion into the spell and his block of ice shoots across the surface of the table. Jules catches it before it can hit the ground, easily bending around Goyle. They place the cool block back onto Malfoy’s plate with, “Here.”

The child glares, but Narcissa taught her son the manners of polite society, so he mutters, “Thank you.”

Serenely, Jules answers, “You’re welcome.”

Performing the swish and point, they convert their own ice into water, then set their wand temporarily aside. “Draco, you don’t have to like someone to know that they’re useful and, more importantly, use them.”

Jules ignores the noise that comes from Crabbe at their use of Malfoy’s first name. “Potter barely understands how to be a wizard, least of all his own fame in this society. He’ll do things without realizing his impropriety and because of the blatant favoritism of those in charge of this school, he’ll get away with it. That makes him an excellent screen for activity that should normally garner more scrutiny.

“And honestly, I didn’t care at all about him until he suddenly started showing up around Hermione Granger. In my opinion, she’s far more useful to be an ally with. Not for how far she’ll get in society when she’s an adult, but for her knowledge right now. Now let’s get back to work, Professor McGonagall’s heading this way.”

Malfoy frowns in confusion but starts sublimating his ice immediately. After McGonagall decides they finally pass muster, spending an unnerving ten minutes trying to help Crabbe and Goyle, and she walks away, the kid says, “It’s still not right that Potter’s allowed onto the Gryffindor team as a seeker.”

* * *

“Zhao, please stay after class,” calls Flitwick from the front of the classroom.

All eyes instantly land on Jules and they fumble the mending charms the class is supposed to be practicing. Their pile of snapped matchsticks clump into a wiggling mass of wood and phosphorus. A snicker escapes from the right.

Even twenty minutes later, while the rest of the Slytherin first years troop out of the classroom, Jules can’t figure out what Flitwick possibly wants to talk with them about. Has someone scooped their thoughts out of their head and are now confronting them on the dangers of decapitating basilisks and running after Horcruxes? Then why is Flitwick approaching them, instead of a summoning to the headmaster’s or Snape’s office? Does someone besides the Gryffindor kids know about their dumpster diving and has a problem with it? But again, why not Snape confronting them as their Head of House?

Jules stands before Flitwick, bag packed, straps twisting between their nervous fingers. “You requested I stay behind, Professor?”

“Yes, yes.” He beams at them. “I have tea with my older students sometimes –” what, since when “– and Ashok Khanna brought to my attention that you’ve been interested in the theory behind magic.”

Oh. That’s one of the upperclassmen Jules has been interrogating during the study club meetings. Right, Flitwick’s head of Ravenclaw.

“Uh, yes sir.”

Flitwick starts rummaging around on his desk. “While I’m pleased in your interest, I must stress that you don’t practice any unsupervised magic. Your ambition is inspiring, but you’re still only a first year. There is much we haven’t covered in classes yet and club tutoring will only take you so far. Ah, here we are.”

He holds out a roll of parchment and Jules takes it for lack of anything else to do. They pull it out flat and blink at the scrawled titles and names. He says, “Still, if you wish to learn more, your professors and the older students are glad to answer any questions. In the meanwhile, here’s a list of books you can request from our library that can get you started.”

“Thank you, Professor.” There’s a preference towards Charms, but also a few titles that seem more general in scope. They pick out a couple titles on Transfigurations and Potions.

“You’re welcome. Are there any questions you have right now?”

Jules rolls the parchment back up and slip it into their bag. It’s still weird he’s doing this for them when Hermione never received treatment like this. Then again, she hasn’t sent five sixth and seventh years into a fervent debate over legislation governing underage magic that almost devolved into a wrestling match after two hours of increasingly loud shouting. And hopefully, there’ll be useful information for their project in bringing their electronics dependency back to life.

Since Jules can’t ask him, “Hey, do you know how to murder a bunch of Dark artifacts or break into a highly secure Gringotts vault,” they toss him something more benign that has been bothering them. “So, what exactly happens education wise after our Hogwarts graduation? Is there any higher education or, I don’t know, apprenticeships? Or do wizards just go straight into the work force or vocational training?”

Turns out, when Jules is done with a career in Dark Lord resurrection prevention, they can run around petitioning someone to take them on as an apprentice if they keep up the research track. Though they’re not sure who will give a no name a chance at what sounds like a system determined to cater only to a miniscule upper class. But hey, something to look forward to if they aren’t tossed into jail for all the highly suspicious activities they’ll be doing over the next few years.

* * *

Friday mornings begin with rolling out of bed and silently changing into a set of clothing they modified for their exercise. Wand and water secured, they head out the castle’s front doors, stretching and warming up under the torchlight outside. Jules hadn’t completely considered the implications of Scotland’s higher degree of latitude compared to the urban centers of the American east coast, and the first time Hagrid’s roosters don’t crow until the end of their run, they are taken aback. Now, they continue on their way, _Lumos_ lit and wand strapped down, hands free for the run. The cold air fills their lungs and clears their head as the thoughts and plans tick through their mind with the swinging clicks of a metronome.

On their return, they shower, and at breakfast, they wash down the quick meal with tea and honey. A brisk walk takes them back down into the dungeons and into the Potions classroom early. Most days, Snape ignores them after the perfunctory opening salvo, good morning, professor, good morning, student.

Today, Jules breeches the routine. They lean against their table. “Professor Snape, may I ask you a question?”

He glances over, slow. “Yes?”

“Advanced potions – mastery level – surely require rare ingredients of strict quality. How do you verify the components before you begin brewing, especially if, say, the ingredients are from a near mythological persuasion?”

“As a first year,” he says, “that doesn’t particularly concern you.”

“Just curious, professor,” they say with a shrug. Why can’t Snape be as helpful as Flitwick?

Between being a student that Snape’s ostensibly Head of House for and a Muggleborn sore thumb sticking out of Slytherin’s normal demography, Jules can’t decide how exactly he feels about them. Whenever they’re in the same room, there tends to be other Slytherins or Potter to distract them from each other, or they ignore each other’s business. Surely Malfoy, Pansy, and others in Jules’ house have already complained to parents and family about their placement in their midst. In return, the parents must have been complaining to Snape and Dumbledore plenty as well.

McGonagall’s first impression of them missing the Hogwarts Express still remains strong. She watches them with perfectly formal expressions and slightly narrow eyes and Jules never sticks around long before or after classes. She keeps throwing them tiny glances to make sure they aren’t rocketing forward through the class material ahead of the pace she sets, like over half of Jules teachers when they _were_ this age the first time around. The balance between annoying and nostalgic leans heavily towards the former.

Flitwick’s apparently getting weird reports from the Ravenclaws and Sprout probably mostly knows them as the kid running past the greenhouses before dawn almost every day. And Snape?

“Quality control is primarily the apothecary’s responsibility, though an experienced potion master will be able to detect substandard ingredients individually as well. For rarer ingredients, you’d turn to more specialized dealers. Have a seat, Zhao.”

Once again, ideally, Jules would sell the basilisk parts through Snape. He’d know what to do with it. Unfortunately, Snape can read minds and will absolutely want to know how Jules got their hands on a whole basilisk corpse – thank you, Potter. The preservation charms on the vials of blood and venom seem to be holding, so they’ll just keep a reserve for a rainy day when Snape is more inclined to look the other way.

In the meanwhile, they’ll start reaching out to the apothecaries in Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade, as well as about all the shady traders in Knockturn. _Actually_, a thought chimes like a bell as Jules pulls their textbook out, _could they find a way to contact Slughorn?_

* * *

It takes six lengthy letter exchanges of varying levels of incredulity, all running along the theme of “Where the hell did you get your hands on fresh basilisk parts, those haven’t been seen in _centuries_, who _are_ you?” before Jules’ first highly suspect paychecks start coming in. Pitting the prospective sellers against each other in a silent auction played right into their hands. And right back out into the hands of a brother-sister duo that are the most likely to own genuine goblin forged blades. They still try to scam Jules out of all of their hard-earned Galleons and the Hogwarts owls start critiquing their scribbling handwriting during the haggling process. Disappointingly, there are no leads on Slughorn’s contact info.

Finally, as November draws to a close, a harassed, miniature flock of owls land on the hastily cleared breakfast table with a series of bulky packages for Jules. The first set reveal to be the electronic junk they ordered and Malfoy faux gags when he sees them shoving the bulky plastic into their book bag.

A few days later, their typewriter arrives, sitting in a gorgeous carrying case of hard leather and brass buckles and rivets. Velvet far better than in any of their old violin cases cradle the typewriter inside, all polished metal and gleaming black letters pressed onto what might be ivory keys. If it is ivory, that’s a bit much, but with a few test presses, _ka-pngh, ka-pngh, kla-kla-klack, _they’re in love. They pack it all back together before someone can get jam stuck among the levers.

Malfoy still tries to leave sticky fingerprints all over the carrying case, asking “What Muggle junk did you get this time?”

“Touch it and get first-degree burns, Malfoy,” they growl and rescue their new precious from the Great Hall hazard zone.

The next Sunday, the Gryffindor trio walk up to Jules waiting by the Room of Requirement, typing up notes at a steady rhythm of clunks and pings. They could slam a silencing spell around the keys, but what’s the charm in a silent typewriter?

“How heavy is that?” Hermione asks while watching them click the case buckles back shut. “I’ve been seeing you carry that all over the place to class and the library.”

Okay, the only place they cast a silencing charm is at the library or Pince would have their head. They shrug and toss the handle from their right hand to their left hand and open the door. “It’s not that heavy. And it’s much easier to sell notes and study guides with typed up documents instead of my crummy handwriting.”

“I’m sorry, _sell_?”

On Wednesday, their knife arrives and not even an attempted Blasting Curse leveled at their book bag by Pansy can bring Jules’ good mood down. Nor does the detention Snape nearly levels at them for pegging the back of her head with slime. Only the Weasley twins coincidentally passing by with far greater mischief redirects the professor’s sour attention.

That evening, the Room of Requirement with great trepidation coughs up Ravenclaw’s diadem into Jules’ waiting arms. Armed with their knife that thankfully didn’t instantly corrode from its dip into a jar of basilisk venom, Jules stalks around the diadem. The central, decorative, metal bird’s tiny eyes track Jules and with the shriek of rusty hinges its beak opens.

“What do we have here? A _Mud_blood, how vile.”

Jules clucks their tongue and sing-songs, “Manners, Riddle. Even megalomaniacs need them.”

The metal shivers and bristles. Goosebumps rise along their arms at the malice sloshing off it in thick waves, an invisible grime like an oil spill’s burden reaching shore. “The only manners to spare for vermin is a swift death under the heel of the boot.”

Typical. “One question though.” They crouch just out of striking distance from the murderous twinkling jewels. “Despite all of your terrible ideas later on, I have the impression you were decently smart at some point of your life. Any idea how, and this is extremely hypothetical, someone can be yanked out of one universe and into another, such as this nonsensical one?”

Something Jules isn’t willing to classify as spirits begins condensing around the diadem staring down Jules and their raised knife. “What would an ignorant scavenger like you understand?” it asks. “You plunder and paw at power without understanding their true value. This knowledge and these resources are wasted on the likes of filth; magic has no place restrained and tainted by mudblood hands, traitors aiming to kill the noble race.”

“Right, I’ll take that as a no.”

The diadem barely has time to puff up ghosts in a last defense before Jules lunges at the snapping bird and plunges their knife in. It screams in their ears and they yelp as the smoke billowing out burns their neck. Their elbows and knees bang painfully against the ground shaking with the diadem’s rage. A risked glance around shows the whole room shuddering with far more dramatics than Jules expected.

On and on, it screams and vibrates against the poisoned blade staked into its jewels. Burning smoke fills the room and Jules desperately wills the ceiling higher. The diadem’s polished silver gleam tarnishes, blackening, then gaining a sickly green rust and crumbling. Its aquamarine jewels crack. Still, the shrieks go on, until it finally subsides into a loud ringing in their ears.

Jules leaves the knife in the twisted remains and rolls over, panting. “Well,” they croak and cough to clear their throat. “Well, that went pretty okay.”

* * *

Jules isn’t expecting next Sunday for Hermione to ask, “Do you know who Nicolas Flamel is?”

After two and a half months in their new life, with a dead basilisk and a destroyed Horcrux behind them, Jules for the first time realizes that running around taking care of Potter’s endgame mission with extreme prejudice might carry unwanted and overly complicated consequences. They already destroyed the plot of Potter’s next school year. At the first opportunity, and the time to strike is nearing, they’re going to ruin the plot of his third year too. With vigorous legwork, they’ll be smearing his sixth year beyond recognition. His skipped seventh year will happen over their dead body. Honestly, fourth one too.

In the face of three pairs of earnest and pleading eyes, they wonder, who are you three going to become?

And they’re not, they’re not strictly doing all this for his benefit or the wizarding world’s benefit. No government takeover, no death squads, no torture, that’s all great, but really, all of this is extremely selfish. Before whatever yanked Jules into this realm – and they have a bone the size of a brontosaur’s femur to pick with whatever was responsible for _that_ \- they had a solid life. A decent job, a vision for their future, plans for more trips to the Louvre and Florence. They were finally settled into their own skin after years of sprinting around like an over caffeinated, headless, castrated chicken.

Then, wham, bam, death by noseless wizard. The sheer injustice and aggravation drives at least three-quarters of their rage.

Still. As far as the near-death experiences go, Potter’s first year isn’t too severe. In addition, if Jules spills the whole solution now, what are they going to do? They don’t think the kids have the music solution to the cerberus puzzle yet. And what use is it if they snag the stone already? Dumbledore’ll just have to hide it again.

Presuming the need to nose into exceptionally dangerous situations is just part of the kids’ extinctual nature, then the next best puzzle for them to riffle through is Jules. Hermione and the professors are already catching on that Jules doesn’t feel like playing the clueless child for more than a millisecond. Three eleven-year-olds with barely any collective self-preservation instincts absolutely should not come near dark artifacts created with murder as the main ingredient. There’s no pragmatic value chaperoning that colossal mess.

Jules gives a lackadaisical shrug and says, “Nope, no clue. Come on, I’ve known wizards existed for – what – about three months? I’m not going to know some random name.”

The kids wilt in exhausted defeat.

* * *

“Well, maybe I _should _do something about Quirrel’s roommate,” Jules thinks while they help Hagrid feed the roosters their morning meal. The thought continues, what’s he going to do against a knife wielding maniac like me?

And if Jules knocked Quirrel out of the game now, maybe Hogwarts will be forced to make its other teachers substitute and actually _teach_ Defense. Maybe even Snape. On one hand, Harry’ll and three-quarters of the school will be miserable and the doubled volume of papers to grade might drive Snape into the early grave – or at least some gray hairs, how doesn’t he have any yet, hair dye? On the other hand, it’ll soothe a tiny part of his soul and Jules will have double the opportunities to remind him he’s supposed to like _all_ of the students in his house and maybe lay off on the invasive mind snooping when the inevitable time comes.

A rooster pecks at Jules’ shoe in search of more corn meal. Jules nails it on the head with a sprinkle of feed in retaliation.

Unfortunately, Jules is crap at dodging beams of light and when a guy literally has eyes on the back of his head, there’s no easy way to sneak up on him. The color green’s slowly growing on Jules, but not enough for a light show of green. Stabbing a knife in Voldemort’s eye right now won’t stick anyways.

Grudgingly, Jules hops off that train of thought while they wave goodbye to Hagrid and jog back into the castle through the misting rain. Instead, their brain boards onto another train all day through classes. They can't do anything about Quirrel, and the kids probably still have that situation well in hand, but they can try tripping up another thorn to poke them in their side in the future.

Peter Pettigrew is instrumental in Voldemort’s rebirth. Peter Pettigrew is a worming coward probably taking a nap in the Gryffindor dorms right now. Peter Pettigrew is absolutely _not_ getting a chance to feed baby gremlin Voldemort snake milk – which, actually, thinking about it now, _what_? Making Peter Pettigrew face his crimes a la the Potters happens to also be a nice bonus.

They can’t just knife Pettigrew, as easy as that would be. For one, that isn’t useful murder and for another, acquitting Sirius will be extremely helpful. He can let them into Grimmauld Place for some stress relieving Horcrux stabbing. Jules doesn’t even want to start contemplating what protections the Black ancestral home has in place to expel trespassing Muggleborns from the premise with the upmost prejudice.

Which leads them to a few days later, still stewing over how to handle the rat. Instead of listening to Professor Binns repeat an earlier lecture on the Giant Wars – the topic quickly lost its interesting newness – Jules flips through a stack of textbooks and spell books, trying to find a convenient set up for their mousetrap.

Their first instinct is to grab Pettigrew with a Summoning Charm and run. Since they’re not trying to leave broken windows and doors in their wake, they’d have to been within the same room as him to pull the theft off comfortably. Ron rarely brings him out of the Gryffindor dorms though, and every time Jules skirts by the Fat Lady, they get a stink eye, so there’s no way to break in. They don’t have an invisibility cloak and the mental logistics around the Disillusionment Charm gives them headaches. Sneaking in isn’t an option.

Then what, wait for Ron to bring Scabbers to class and swipe him in front of over twenty witnesses including Snape? No. Besides, while they reckon _accio_ works on small animals, they’re not certain if there’s any interference when the small animal is actually a man in disguise. Feels like there should be? Ugh, if only Jules could ask McGonagall without painting a giant target on themselves. 

There is something that might actually work.

By early December, Jules has their preferred worktable staked out at the library, even if they haven’t used it enough or have enough seniority to really claim it as theirs. It’s a shame Pince doesn’t do reservations on the workspaces, though they’ll let it slide this time.

Hermione looks up from the stacks of books around her, ignoring Ron clutching his shin in pain where she just kicked him for putting his face in a book in frustration. Harry doesn’t seem to register a word on the page he’s been staring blankly at while Jules walks over. “Hey, y’all,” they say for the pleasure of Hermione’s briefly pinched face of annoyance. “what are you up to?”

“Homework,” she says.

Jules tips their head to the side, the better to read titles on spines. “Don’t know what history class you’re taking Granger, but Binn’s been lecturing on nothing but giants. All this seems far more modern and far more interesting.”

“It’s not really your business, is it?” Harry challenges.

Readjusting their hold on their typewriter case’s handle into a more comfortable grip, they wiggle their other hand in a so-so see-saw. “Kinda is, actually. You guys still trying to figure out who Nicky Flamel is?”

Hermione overrides Ron’s echoed “Nick_y?_" with narrowed eyes and says, too honest, “Yes.”

“Cool, I figured out what he did. Ah-ah-ah,” they hold a hand up against the intent faces springing up at them. “Ain’t sharing without a deal. I got something you want, you got something I want.”

They point at Ron and the kid tenses. “You have a rat, right?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, Malfoy wouldn’t shut up about rat bites and fleas right when school started. I got a few spells I want to try out and I need an animal. Don’t have one of my own and blood will be spilled if I try with any of the pets in Slytherin.”

Indignation fills Ron’s voice when he asks, “What do you need Scabbers for?”

Aw, how cute, he’s so protective of the little criminal. Jules shrugs, “Still thinking about animal communication. Dug up a few spells in a couple of books about translation and attunement. Shouldn’t hurt it.”

Arched brow, smirking, “Or I can let you get back to your Flamel treasure hunt?”

Hermione chews on a lip and says, “Ron.”

“No, who knows what she wants to do to him?” he insists.

Jules pulls out a typed-up sheet and waves to Hermione. She takes it out of their hands and reads the list of spells and notes. They explain, “That’s a list of things I have in mind, won’t hurt the little guy, I swear. However, I don’t have all day, folks. Take it or leave it.”

“These do seem harmless,” she says slowly and Ron groans. Harry’s head swivels back and forth watching the two, probably torn on who’s side to take. “Come on, Ron. We can watch her while she does this. Zhao’s not like Malfoy.”

“Still a Slytherin,” he says.

Jules taps against their wrist, _tick, tock_.

Unfortunately for Ron’s understandable misgivings, Hermione decided she’s taking charge of this operation and turns back to Jules. “Fine. Tell us who Nicholas Flamel is first.”

“Rat first. Hand him over,” Jules counters.

Ron frowns and says, “I’m not _giving_ you Scabbers. You can’t do anything to him without me there.”

Oh for – “I’m not going to hurt him,” Jules says, but he shakes his head vehemently. They glance at the other two. Hermione might be able to knuckle down and chase through the entirety of Hogwart’s library on her own, but Harry is giving the stacks of thick books wane looks of horror as Jules and Ron’s standoff over his murderous rat drags out. Sighing, they say, “Alright, you can be there then. Does that work?”

Hermione doesn’t go so far as to slap a hand over Ron’s mouth, but she intercepts whatever he might say to pipe up, “Yes, that works.”

Having the kids as an audience isn’t ideal and they’ll probably have to change their plans. Either way, they can adapt. “Excellent. I’ll see you upstairs in a bit.”

They turn and leave. Behind them, Harry asks, “You sure about this?”

And Hermione answers, “We need this lead, Harry. And she’s … polite enough.”

Fifteen minutes later, the three join Jules outside the Room of Requirements. Ron glares at them, clutching his rat perhaps a bit too tightly. It squeaks.

This time the room’s a simple affair. No vents, no fireplaces to escape through. The door slides against the floor smoothly, with barely half a centimeter between the floor and the bottom of the door. Small, unopenable windows line up high along a wall. The plain drywall and bare hardwood floor reminds them of touring unoccupied apartments.

They slide their bag and case under the single table in the center of the room and direct Ron to set Pettigrew down on its surface.

“Now, I’m not certain why you’re looking for Flamel among recent magical history,” Jules says while circling the rat sniffing the air in confusion. “And there’s no way you’d find him there. Flamel’s a bit amazing, a bit terrifying. He’s an old alchemist, and I mean _old_. Over six hundred years old actually. Huh, think he ever met Joan of Arc? Anyways, he created the Philosopher’s Stone which among things gives you eternal life. He and his wife are still kicking.”

Jules begins mentally preparing the first decoy spell on their list. “That any help?”

“Eternal life, really?” asks Harry.

Hermione cuts in, “How did you figure this out? Last time we asked, you had no idea who he was.”

This spell’s really more for interpreting bird songs, Jules thinks with amusement, almost like being a Disney princess. They cast it anyways and as expect nothing happens beyond Ron flinching and Pettigrew wiggling his nose at them. “Again, not certain why you limited yourself to modern wizards. I just pulled out a catalogue of famous wizards and there he was. See, no harm done, Weasley.”

Kid grumbles. Jules ignores the excited communication the three try to share silently. The stone! Maybe the stone? Probably the stone.

Pettigrew turns an interesting shade of purple. Uh. They – hopefully – undo the spell and he returns to grimy gray. Without Ron’s shouting, the process would have taken only a few minutes, instead of over ten. Jules also gets Pettigrew to squeak in a series of beeps at one point and this afternoon’s developing in interesting directions they hadn’t anticipated. None of these spells are actually supposed to do much, since there truly isn’t much in Hogwart’s library on giving animals human speech.

Three-quarters of the way through their list, magical interference pops up left and right like too loud static. Pettigrew starts running around in the glass cage Jules plonked on top of him, trapping him on the table. They bat away Ron’s unhappiness by driving Hermione into debates with them about what’s happening, sneaking in a tiny detection spell underneath the discussion.

“Magical pets aren’t supposed to cause these kinds of problems,” Jules tells Hermione. “Something funny’s going on. Looks like your rat’s a real special rat, Weasley.”

“Any idea what’s the cause?” Harry’s interest in the proceedings is a pleasant surprise, but that probably more thanks to the pops and sparks and echoing reverbs Jules is tossing around like confetti.

They check over their notes again. Eventually, things will stop working out so well for Jules, but for now life seems content to let them rampage unchecked. They half-lie, “Not really. There’s something, but it’s a real stretch. Hmm. Weasley, how old is your rat?”

“My family’s had him for about ten years.”

Their frown isn’t even completely for show because, “Is that normal for magic rats? Last I checked, rat life spans are in the range of about two years, not ten.”

He shrugs uncomfortably, “Not really? We keep good care of him, he’s just a rat, Zhao, lay it off.”

“Where did you even find him?” Jules presses. They honestly don’t remember if that is answered in canon. Turns out Ron doesn’t quite know either.

They look down at the rat trapped under the glass in front of them. He runs paws over his limp whiskers in agitation. The missing finger catches their attention and they stare at it. This coward murdered how many Muggles in one blow just to escape retribution for selling out his supposed best friend and his family? And who knows how many else too? Simpering, begging, snot not exactly everywhere, but just as well. Running to the men with the sticks that crack the loudest.

That a man like Peter Pettigrew can so easily cast Jules’ life into persecuted jeopardy if he manages to run back into the hands of his chosen master sets their teeth on edge and tension crawling through their bones. This man kills a seventeen-year-old without hesitation.

“I think you three should step back,” they say quietly, no biting smile, no sharp humor. There is a task that must be done.

Three pairs of feet shuffle back, a question is asked, and Jules ignores it in favor of gently lifting the glass case ever so slightly and snatches the rat when he tries to run with their free hand. Their distant voice tells the children, “It’s a long shot,” only half an explanation, as they pour their concentration and clawing will into a spell they have not practiced, that must go right on this first try, channel through a conduit of ebony and dragon heartstring, _reveal_.

Holding onto the neck of a man as he transforms from a rat is one of the weirdest sensations Jules has ever experienced and they’re in no hurry to repeat.

Pettigrew … Pettigrew’s balding, disconcertingly plump – guess the Weasleys did keep him well fed – scrambling and failing, twisting his limbs and scratching ragged nails against their arm. His eyes scramble from Jules’ blank face to the kids yelling and scurrying in the tiny room that no one Jules doesn’t want to leave will leave. He's not choking yet, but here’s a man that spent the last ten years as a rat and wizards as a whole never put much stock in muscle tone. Jules has the advantage of almost a foot in height over him, far more hours spent keeping in shape, and the ability to scrape together a couple dozen pushups in a row and swing a series of mean punches.

They give him a warning squeeze and he hacks for air.

“Well, well, well,” says the Jules that verbally sparred against men worth multimillions, that cuts down anyone that gave their brother trouble, that methodologically killed a basilisk and stabbed a Horcrux to death. “How interesting. There isn’t a rat Animagi on the records. Who are you?”

The man gasps and tattered robes shift an inch. They glance at his left arm and hum. “Actually, I don’t really care. It’s not my department. I think the Aurors can handle that, don’t you?”

“Who _is_ that, what is going _on?_” screams Ron. “What did you do to Scabbers?”

Jules pinches Pettigrew’s robes and yanks his left sleeve up. He tries to twist his forearm out of sight and fed up, they slam him onto the ground, pin him with their weight, and seize his left wrist and holds it out for the kids to see. “All I did to your rat was force him to reveal his true form. Look,” they say. “He’s a Death Eater. See that tattoo? It’s the Death Mark, all of Voldemort’s followers who were active during the war have it.”

Slightly purple in the face, Pettigrew gurgles.

“Jules…” Hermione says and trails off, something almost frail and frightened in the inhales of her breath. They look up and see her ashy expression, Ron’s staggering confusion, and the careful, careful stillness of Harry Potter. Ragged nails claw at their arm.

“I’m sorry,” they tell Ron who blinks at them with a scrunched-up expression. “Your family didn’t deserve to be sleeping in the same house with a murderer for a decade.”

Hermione says again, just loudly over the desperate wheezing, “Jules. You’re… you’re choking him, even if he’s – you’re choking him.”

And Jules comes back to themselves enough to remember, right, eleven-year-olds. They don’t need to see this kind of violence. With one last warning squeeze, they release Pettigrew’s neck, wand aimed with a menacing purpose at his body. The instance they take their foot off his chest, he scrambles away, hands at his neck, lungs heaving for oxygen. In their peripheral vision, they see Hermione nervously edging away.

“What are you going to do with him?” Harry asks, quiet.

He’s still standing perfectly still, tiny in his robes with his wild hair and his green eyes, the only inheritance from his parents that he understood for most of his life so far that didn’t come with daily cruelty. In the cold blue light they filled this inescapable cell with, he’s like one of Hogwart’s statutes: solid stone or metal and capable of lashing out with punishing hits. And the kid doesn’t even know the half of it yet with this particular Death Eater. Jules spares him the tiniest flick of their eyes and opens their mouth to tell him, when a rough and wheezing plea interrupts them, “Please, I’m not a murderer, I didn’t want to, you don’t know what it was like.”

All of their cold anger flashes superhot, boiling vapor flashing in an explosive and concussive wave, like lava dropped into a pool of water.

“You bear the Dark Mark, at best you’re a conspirator with Voldemort’s forces, at worst you’re lying,” Jules hisses at him. “Did you ever stand trial? I’m assuming you didn’t since you’re not walking as a free man and you’re not in Azkaban. You _ran_, like a coward.”

“Please, you don’t know what it was like, you’re too young to know, you couldn’t trust anyone and everyone you knew was dying. _Please_, I’m not what you accuse me of. You don’t even know what you’re accusing me of, I never killed anyone,” Pettigrew rasps. His watering eyes dart towards Ron and Harry.

“Be quiet,” Jules spits.

But Pettigrew sputters and whimpers, “Ron, dear Ron, I was your family’s pet, I was just your poor rat-”

“_Shut up_,” yells Jules. “_Shut up! _You facilitated the murder of at least hundreds of people and now you’d cower and beg a child to grant you mercy? You don’t deserve the good faith in any of their hearts, not after taking advantage of the Weasley’s shelter for ten years. The people you should be begging your innocence to are the Aurors. _Petrificus Totalus_.”

He spasms as the curse yanks his limbs into its preferred position and he topples to his side. A furious red still claws over their vision, but they breathe in a deep, harsh breath through their nose and lower their hand gripping their wand. With a hiss, they exhale and decide, _change of plans after all_, then say, “Hermione.”

She jolts.

“Go get a professor. Quickly. Preferably Professor McGonagall.”

The door slams in her scrambling wake. After a beat and their eyes never leaving Pettigrew, they say, “When the professors get here, we’re probably not staying and can’t come back for a while. You boys pack your bags. Don’t go near him.”

Around fifteen minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. Harry opens it. Hermione stands at the front of the group, tinges of gray pallor on her face, wringing her hands in the dark folds and volumes of her sleeves intentionally just too long, so that she can grow into them. Directly behind her, McGonagall stands, her normal ruler straight posture even more severe. Finally, is Dumbledore. Bags slung over their shoulders, the boys flock to Hermione’s side.

“Miss Zhao,” McGonagall says, and Jules steps aside, revealing Pettigrew’s paralyzed form. The professors don’t visibly react.

Acidly, Jules says, “He claims full innocence. As if he got that tattoo on a lark.”

“Miss Zhao, you’ve done admirably, but now let us professors handle this case.” They turn stiffly towards Dumbledore, who continues, “I suggest you all return to your common rooms, until your Heads of House speak to you about today’s events. Go on now.”

The kids scurry away. Jules casts one last glance at Pettigrew’s sweaty, frozen face past the headmaster’s lurid teal robes, then turns on their heels and walks away.

* * *

“Come in.”

The door closes after Jules with a muffled thump that almost echoes across the stone walls of Snape’s office. His desk is meticulously bare, with only one chair in front of it. Behind him are rows of textbooks and manuals, sandwiched between jars and miscellaneous heavy trinkets acting like bookends. Jules sets their bags on the ground by the desk and sits.

“Good evening sir,” they say.

He ignores this to demand, “What were you doing with Weasley’s rat today?”

“I was curious about magical forms of communication with animals, sir,” they answer honestly.

“Are you not aware that those spells are far more advanced that than the capabilities of a first year and thus should not be attempted by someone at your stage of education yet?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then why did you still do it?”

“Sir, all the spells I tried and planned to try were unlikely to rebound to a detrimental degree upon myself. In addition, the research I did before assured me that they were unlike to cause harm to the animal target, should there be ethical concerns. The others were kept at a safe distance, in case stray interference and rebounds did occur,” they tell him. Snape’s eyes bore into theirs, fixed and dark in the green tinged light pervasive in the castle’s dungeon levels. Report done, they hold their silence.

Somewhere in the distance, a clock should be ticking.

Finally, he says, “Your first reaction was to choke him.”

“Not quite, sir. My hand was already around his chest and neck from when he was still a rat. Then it didn’t seem prudent to let go when his identity was revealed, sir.”

“His identity?” Snape repeats.

“As a Death Eater.” Realizing who they’re talking to and who they’re living in close quarters with, they add, “Masquerading as pet rat for about ten years, sir.”

One of the pickled things in a jar, a skeleton of some kind, starts bobbing. Jules watches it for a moment, then return their attention back to Snape as he switches tracks and says, “The man you performed your … citizen’s arrest on is known as Peter Pettigrew. He was believed dead for ten years in a rather high-profile incident. Your discovery of him is causing the Ministry some trouble.”

How carefully he navigates around the source of his distaste. “Will the government want to question me?” they ask.

“No,” he says decisively. “You are a minor. The school will be fielding questions from the Ministry and the press going forward.”

Without anything better to really say, they tell him, “Thank you. What’s going to happen to Pettigrew?”

“There’s an investigation. If he’s found guilty, he’ll go to prison.”

They both sit in silence for five minutes more, where he doesn’t ask so much as, “Do you have any other questions and concerns?” but instead eventually says, “You’re dismissed.”

Jules collects their belongings and gets up. “Have a good evening, sir,” they say as they leave through the door.

* * *

The holidays should mean: the bus station, standing in line, ears and nose tinged pink with the cold, coat buttoned up and scarf knotted, getting on, settling half-way to comfortable in the seat’s too small seats, watching the sea of light from the power plants by the highway, dozing off, waking up an hour from home, get in the car, get tripped by the cat at home, give gifts, go to parties, play games, work overtime, family.

The castle sends its students off in one haul. In the morning, the common room’s claustrophobic with people running back and forth, scooping up last minute items they forgot to pack, bags and trunks banging their way up and down the dungeon stairs, _thunk, thunk, thunk_. The Great Hall swells with students waiting for their turn on the carriages to the train station.

By afternoon, Jules has the Slytherin dormitories largely to themselves. And the Slytherin table at dinner. The whole Great Hall looms bereft, its fake night sky snowing gently over the empty chairs and the far too much food. A scattering of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw sit at their tables, the Weasleys and Potter at Gryffindor, a single perfect on the other end of Slytherin’s table from Jules.

For whatever reason, the house elves deck out the dinner tables with the full feast, far too much for the tiny percentage of Hogwarts remaining. They grimace at the waste. Why the hell? Where will it go?

They sit in their silent island and carefully prune away the thin branches reaching towards something that could be mistaken for loneliness and clouded visions.

Here, in the trough of winter’s pit, swollen and nestled in white snowbanks draped over tiled roofs, so far north from what they’re used to, daylight fades faster than they can sneeze. They soak up as much as they can stand in the cold each day, kicking paths through the fields and around the frozen banks of the lake. The only tree not bent and sagging under the cold, wet weight is the Whomping Willow, shaking off the flakes like a dog. Ice slowly spreads across the Great Lake and they only have enough time to jog around it with a couple laps before the sun sets too far.

A day or so after a present free Christmas, Jules discovers they have a loose tooth. Jules is _young_ enough to still have loose teeth. What a _trip_.

It’s a poor trip, they have to say, because absolutely and seriously, why. What the hell. Snow gets into their shoes as they run through the snow, plowing through the cold and heavy drifts with their legs in the dark. They run because they always run around dawn and keep running because every time they close their mouth a moment and press their tongue against the roof of their mouth and their teeth, they feel the loose tooth. They’re supposed to be almost _thirty_, given a few more years, not –

With a sound of outrage, they slam to halt, then stumble forward into a walk back towards the dimly glowing castle. Their breath clouds in the air. The second their heartrate drops back below a hundred beats a minute, they yank the tooth out. Blood pools in their mouth as they step up to Hogwart’s front door.

God, they want their old body and their old world back. They want the internet at the tap of a finger, music in their ears, all the advancements of digital electronics and computer programming and the convenience of their life. Their own apartment, as small as it was. Their own kitchen to cook the meals learned from their parents, with star anise and slices of ginger and hoisin sauce and some _plain rice_. They want their income, they want their job, they want their city, they want their history, they want the magic of _technology_, not magic itself, as compelling and interesting it has been and is.

Jules spends the rest of the day scratching at the endless hordes of the Room of Requirement and checking on the preservation spells on their basilisk parts. When they get back to the silent dorm room, just before curfew, they find a pale cream card placed on their pillow. _Come to the Headmaster’s office tomorrow at 10 am_, it says.

“Christ,” they curse under their breath.

* * *

The first time Jules visits the headmaster’s office, there are on display: astrolabes that grew three more arms, several possible perpetual motion machines, something with no discernable use other than being a fog machine, a perch for Fawkes that Jules almost knocks over, and plenty of other clutter. Dumbledore’s florescent purple – the color honestly might be beyond purple and magically entering an eighth color beyond the visual spectrum – robes make everything pale and sensible in comparison.

Jules takes the remaining chair arrayed around Dumbledore’s desk and tries to not smack their knees against anything. Potter watches them with confusion since the moment they came into view. Given the track record of all the adults in this room, Jules absolutely included, they’re willing to wager a sure bet that no one explained why he’s been summoned. They didn’t receive an explanation either, but one glance at the too skinny and too pale man on the kid’s other side, sinking into an overly friendly armchair with hands gripping the arms so tight the white knuckles are tinged with blue, Jules can guess. Sirius Black can’t have been released from Azkaban for more than a week and he looks the part: he looks like shit.

The robes are new and alarming in their fitting, which didn’t hide his thin waist and thin limbs. His nails are ragged, and someone had carelessly cut his hair recently, into something that hangs in sloppy layers to just above his shoulders. He’d had a handsome face before, but now it’s stretched thin and sunken with pale hunger and deprivation. Wisps of something vacant swirl in his dark eyes; it’s still too soon since he was scooped away from the dementors. Black’s determination in his innocence gave him a thin rope to cling onto, but he didn’t have a vengeful fire burning in his soul. Jules stole the hunt from him.

It turns out that having most of the student body home over the holidays carries the distinct advantage of minimizing the immediate fallout of everyone losing their minds at Black’s presence in the castle.

“Good afternoon, headmaster, professors. Hey there Potter. Uh, hi. Sir,” they say and cross their legs uneasily. Their right knee slams into the corner of the extremely solid desk. McGonagall doesn’t so much as glance at the loud noise and Jules’ stifled gasp as they clutch at the screaming nerves.

“Thank you for joining us Jules,” Dumbledore says. Black regards them with a fraction more interest. The headmaster continues, “Now that everyone is here –” which means Snape is somewhere else fuming disastrously about Black’s existence “—we can address the matters at hand. First, Harry, may I introduce you to your godfather Sirius Black.”

“My godfather?” Harry says dumbfoundedly.

“Yes,” Black says, or starts to. He clears his throat and tries again. “I am. I was your father’s best friend during school and afterwards and I’m sorry it took me so long to meet you again.”

The kid’s polite enough to not outright question him in his face, but there’s an air of dubious confusion in his posture. Then things take a turn for the interesting when Black say in what will be and already is a cliché, “You look just like your father,” because Harry shifts in surprise and just a smudge of guilt. He’s found the mirror already, Jules realizes.

Awkwardly, they look down at the bowl of yellow candy conveniently placed in front of them. They look back up. Something from Dumbledore … twinkles in their general direction. They pop one into their mouth as quickly as they can.

“Mr. Potter,” McGonagall starts kindly, trying to find the best way to break it to an eleven-year-old that: “The night your parents died triggered many series of events. Someone lead He Who Must Not Be Named to your family and we all thought, wrongly, that it was Mr. Black. For this, and an incident that resulted in the death of twelve Muggles, Mr. Black was sent to Azkaban, the main prison for Britain’s magical community. Now that Peter Pettigrew’s been apprehended and certainly guilty, Mr. Black’s been released.”

What she doesn’t say, but Jules read between the lines of her words and the Daily Prophet’s, is that the Minister, Fudge, is taking full advantage of this scandal to drum up support for his new tenure and assert his right to leadership in the wake of all the shoulder shrugging and muttering from trying to find the successor for Bagnold, who rode her popularity from managing the Death Eater trials for as hard as she could until she had to step down at the end of her term. The Aurors are in an intriguing predicament between defending but apologizing for their past actions along with straddling between the balance of how much they can blame the past administration. Already, the families that were harassed and tried in the wake of Voldemort’s disappearance are petitioning for investigations and inquiries into their treatment. Jules crunches the lemon drop into pieces, finishing off the candy with their usual alarming speed.

Hit in the head with that brick of information, Potter blinks and then asks, “Does that mean I have to go back to the Dursleys?”

“I’m afraid they’re still your guardians,” Dumbledore says. Potter slumps in his seat.

“If I may,” Jules interrupts because they want to escape this room already and stop being surrounded by Gryffindors, “why am _I _here? I’m not part of Potter’s custody battle.”

Dumbledore smiles at them. They sneak about another five candies off his desk. But Black’s the one that leans forward in his seat, the better to look around Harry and the corner of the elephant of a desk to say, “I wanted to meet the kid that managed to catch that rat. No one even knew he was still alive.” He grins.

Jules examines him with raised eyebrows; it’s not exactly a nice grin. They say, “If you have any more friends that turned out to be traitors, I can’t help with that. I’ve been banned by my Head of House from performing advanced spells unsupervised and willy-nilly anymore.” But they add, half-jokingly, “All future unveilings will have to happen anonymously, by delivering the suspect to the authorities by mail in a jar.”

McGonagall’s eyes narrow but Black snorts out a laugh. He asks, “How’d you uncover Peter anyways?”

“His Animagus status messed up a bunch of my spells. Then I did a bunch of ill-advised things that I’ve already been told off and had points taken away for.”

“She was trying to make animals speak like humans,” Potter supplies helpfully.

Jules shrugs and nods their head towards him. “There, we’ve met me. Professors, I don’t think it’s that appropriate for me to be around for whatever discussion you’re having about where Potter … lives?”

“You may leave, Jules,” Dumbledore says.

They stand up, nod at the general direction of everyone and beat a hasty exit after saying good day. The office’s door closes behind them and they walk away. Asking Black about access to his house and searching for the locket Horcrux can come later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Direct Action


End file.
